This watch is an unashamed copy of the Seiko A239 world time watch with two things the Seiko never had, one good and one bad.
The good is the addition of melody alarms – two of them – Around the World in 80 Days, and It’s a Small World.
The bad is the reflective crystal – I’m not sure why some watch manufacturers experimented with this as it makes the crystal graphics difficult to read in some lights (and impossible to photograph) with no real benefit. In the right light it looks very nice but you have to move it around to get the right light so I don’t really see the point.
Still, that’s a small complaint for what is a pretty cool watch.
The big feature, other than the two melodies, is the dual-LCD.
In ‘normal’ view, you can see a similar display to usual LCD watches, time, day/date, seconds etc, but press a button and you get world time on a graphical world map.
The thing (or one of the things) I like most is that you can adjust it for daylight saving which is pretty cool.
New Zealand Time (WGT) doesn’t feature, but luckily there’s a spare space (the ellipsis on the top right) where this can be added and all the other times are correct based on this so it works great.
With the two alarms, you can set one for ‘home’ time and one for ‘world’ time.
About the only real problem with this watch is how to set it. I’ve seen a lot of these watches in the past 15 years, but never seen a manual and, while they copied the Seiko functionality quite closely, there are differences in the setting procedure (and I still can’t work out how to get the hourly chime to work).
So setting the time/date/home etc takes ages (particularly since I never remember to write it down) and you often see these for sale with the seller comment ‘can’t set it’ which makes you wonder if it’s faulty until you actually work out the procedure.
If someone else has one of these (they appeared under the Armitron, Tempic and Zeon brands, among others too) and has the setting procedure sorted, please let me know – and especially if you know how to set the hourly chime.
Great watch, getting much harder to find, and the dual LCD (which might even be two colours – red/black) plus melodies makes it a definite keeper, if you can get your head around the setting procedure!