10 Types Of Watches Popular Among Men

People say you can tell a lot about a man from the shoes he wears, the belt, and most importantly his watch. It’s pretty accurate too; a watch is not just a time telling piece of machinery. A watch shows the taste a person has and says a lot about kind of a man they are.

There are many different watch brands out there, covering a variety of tastes from sport and military watches to luxury and smart ones. It can get quite overwhelming to try to choose a watch type, especially if you’re a novice with not much experience in the world of watches.

There are however some types of watches that are more popular than the others, and these are 10 of them you should know if you do indeed plan on getting into the extremely fun universe of watches.

1. Analog watches

This is the first type of hand watches and it’s pretty much the oldest ever made. A typical analog watch will feature numbers displayed from 1 to 12, with the latter being at the top of the watch. It also has hours and minutes hands, and some have a second hand, all rotating in a clockwise direction.

Analog watches are pretty traditional forms of watches and they come in Latin or Roman numerals, depending on your preference. Analog watches are definitely for vintage style lovers and those who’d like to steer clear from the digital watches of the modern day.

2. Digital watches

A digital watch is pretty much the exact opposite of an analog watch. Instead of regular display with numbers and hand, a digital watch has a display where hours, minutes, and seconds are displayed as regular digits on the screen.

It’s a safe bet if you’re into digital watches that you’ve come across the Casio G-Shock, possibly the most famous and affordable digital watch that comes with a variety of options and cool tricks.

Digital watches tell time more accurately than an analog, and you don’t need to guess the minutes because every detail of the hour is displayed in numbers. They also have the very cool option of having backlight that can be activated by the push of a button!

3. Automatic watches

Automatic timepieces are something special for a watch aficionado. They look sublime and they don’t require a battery or electricity to work. They rather work based on a special mechanism inside the watch that winds it when the wearer uses it. So basically the watch winds itself when you put it on your wrist and stores energy for some time after that.

4. Quartz watches

These run on a quartz crystal that powers an oscillator within the watch itself. Due to using the quartz mineral, this type of watches is far more accurate than most and it keeps time within a very small margin of error. They will need to have their batteries replaced from time to time, though.

5. Tritium watches

This is a new type of watches that has been gaining much popularity over the past few years. These watches are ordinary watches, but with the added feature of tritium, a radioactive gas that glows in the dark. As a result, tritium watches can maintain a light and opacity for a long time, up to 20 years.

This is why tritium watches are essential for military personnel or any person who spends a lot of time outdoors in dim lighted conditions. True, many watches come with options to glow in the dark, but none last as long as tritium or are as efficient. The cool thing is also the gas doesn’t require a power source or even the sun to operate.

6. Smart watches

Smart watches have been quite the thing for the past decade or so. They’ve integrated mobile software and user OS into watches so that they could feature much more options than your average watch. For instance, a traditional smart watch would get connected to your smartphone via Bluetooth and it’d allow you to view notifications, take calls from the watch itself, play music, monitor heart rate and sleep, and so much more.

More importantly, smart watches have been extremely popular amongst athletes and sports enthusiasts because they offer great options for exercise tracking and some like the Galaxy Smartwatch even come with the option of built in exercise for you to follow.

7. Hybrid watches

While smart watches are great and feature plenty of cool options, watch purists find them too artificial and gimmicky to use. This is where hybrid watches come in. They basically combine the options of a smart watch in a classic design like your favorite leather watch. So you’d get the design you’d always loved along with some cool smart options.

8. Solar powered watches

From mechanical and automatic watches to quartz, energy sources have varied across the watch industry. It only made sense someone would think about capitalizing on the greatest energy source we have as humans, the sun. Solar powered watches operate by simply capturing energy from the sun and converting it to electric energy to operate the watch.

9. Diving watches

As the name suggests, diving watches are used for swimming, scuba diving, and free diving. They have some very interesting and powerful features that make them quite different from your different water resistant watch.

The most important feature of this is atmospheric pressure resistance, as divers need to go deep into the water. If your watch has 100 m (330 ft) written on it, then this watch can handle its own underwater.

10. Luxury watches

The best of the best, luxury watches are gorgeous and they are definitely not for everyone. While they are out of most people’s budget range, it doesn’t mean you can’t look them up to enjoy their beauty and craftsmanship.

Some would say Patek Philippe is the most gorgeous watch manufacturer there is, and if you look into their designs and price tags, you’d find it hard to disagree with that claim.

 

Read Up On Watches

Truth is, there are many other types of watches other than the ones mentioned above, which even have different types and options within them. To get really acquainted with the different watches and very cool designs and options, you need to do your homework and get to know what watches are out there.

The world of watches is a truly magnificent one that can enrich you in more ways than you could know. It’s one of life’s greatest joys to purchase and wear a remarkable time piece that makes a statement about who and what you are.

But before you can do that, learn all you can about the world you’re getting into, because it would make a great difference in purchasing a watch when you already know much about them.

 

Svend Andersen: the godfather of modern independent watchmaking

Disclosure: there is no financial relationship between the #watchnerd and Andersen Genève. I paid for my own travel and accommodation during my visit to Geneva in January 2017.

If you wander away from the centre of Geneva along the Rhône, past the big hotels and the Bâtiment des Forces Motrices, you might stumble upon Andersen Genève’s atelier. Given the slightly out-of-the-way location, it’s probably unlikely, but if you do, you may be lucky enough to find Svend Andersen working at his bench.

Mr Andersen is something of a legendary figure in the world of independent watchmaking, having co-founded the Académie Horlogère des Créateurs Indépendants* (AHCI) in 1985 with Vincent Calabrese. Its aims were (and still remain) to promote handmade timepieces, attract the world’s most creative independents and support young clock- and watchmakers**.

Svend Andersen was also at the head of his own brand for four decades until he took (semi-)retirement in March 2015. I first met his replacement, Pierre-Alexandre Aeschlimann at SalonQP that year, and then again at an evening organised by a fellow #watchnerd. Pierre-Alexandre brought along a selection of watches that represented the current Andersen Genève collection, including examples of the Montre à Tact, Jour et Nuit, World Time and even some unusual, erotic watches.

     

Holed up in a conference room deep in the bowels of the Royal Automobile Club on Pall Mall was, perhaps, not an ideal setting to explore the rich history of the brand, nor Svend Andersen’s impact on the world of horology and independent watchmaking. However, Pierre-Alexandre’s sheer exuberance quickly won over everybody around the table, and I have to admit that it was quite fun to see #watchnerds closely examining the goings on of the various eroto-automata.

Watchmaker of the impossible.

For the last four decades, Sven Andersen’s philosophy has been never to say no to a customer. This has lead to some quite extraordinary watches, many of which became models within the Andersen Genève collection, although some remained pièces uniques. During that time, Mr Andersen has also been commissioned to undertake modifications of other watches, and it was upon one of these latter pieces that he was working when we met him in January.

  

I’d been given Mr Andersen’s mobile number by Pierre-Alexandre so that we might arrange a convenient time to visit. Although officially retired, Mr Andersen spends more than a few hours a week working in the atelier. On the afternoon of our visit, he was servicing a flyback calendar module that a client had asked him to add to a Tiffany & Co-retailed triple date. The module meant a new dial was required, as well as a mid-band to increase the height of the case.

It’s never easy, meeting watchmakers like Mr Andersen. How does one even begin to interview a man who launched an independent watch brand four decades ago and co-founded the AHCI in 1985? Sometimes it’s best just to start at the beginning, and so, after a brief chat about the many talented independent watchmakers who form the membership of the AHCI, I asked him about clocks.

Svend Andersen’s Bottle Clocks, with original tools on the left

Back in 1969, before his world time watches, erotic dials and secular perpetual calendar, Mr Andersen worked for Gübelin and it was during this period that he created a series of items that managed to take the idea of the “ship in the bottle” and combine it with horology. The production of these Bottle Clocks brought Svend to the attention of Patek Philippe, amongst others, and he soon found a job working in their complications department.

If you’ve not seen one of these “bottle clocks” up close, it can be difficult to comprehend how he managed to do it at all: the dial and movement are in pieces, and were assembled inside the bottle. Of course, with the neck of these bottles being so narrow, Mr Andersen not only had to cut the pieces into relatively small strips, but also to find a way to assemble them in situ. A sample of the tools is shown at bottom left in the photo above.

The rear of one of Svend Andersen’s Bottle Clocks

Turning the bottle over makes it a little easier to see how the pieces fit together, but doesn’t really give an indication as to how these small screws were affixed. The tools that Mr Andersen had to invent just to assemble these Bottle Clocks are works of art in themselves: forceps operated from outside the bottle; screwdrivers with a ninety-degree turn; and long tweezers to hold the screws in place. Of course, these were largely electrical clocks, with the batteries hidden in the stoppers, rather than manually-wound mechanical movements, but they remains items of wonder and so little magic.

Inspired by Breguet.

Andersen Genève Montre à Tact

The modern Andersen Genève collection does not include any clocks, although it does build on the playfulness that can be seen in almost everything that Sven Andersen has designed. The Montre à Tact, for example, is a take on the watches made by Breguet from the late 18th century. In 1795, just as now (perhaps), it was considered rather impolite to look at one’s watch during dinner, or while having a meeting. Where Breguet’s watches were largely tactile in nature, the Andersen Genève version replaces the dial  and hands altogether, replacing them with a circular rotating display, visible through a gap in the case between the lugs.

Introducing a revolving display allows the watch to be read at a much lower angle, and usually without moving the wrist at all. Of course, when you surround the movement, you make it impossible to have a normal crown; hence the winder is relegated to the back of the watch. Relegating time to the edge of the case frees up the entire dial, leading to some interesting  designs. I particularly liked the aventurine version (below), which is absolutely stunning in natural light.

Montre à Tact aventurine dial Anderson Genève

Perhaps the most unusual (excluding the erotic watches) were the poker-playing dogs – a series of seven or eight scenes, based on the Coolidge paintings. Each of these is unique, hand-painted onto the “dial” by a local miniature artist. While photographing one of these pieces, I noticed that the painter had managed to include the Andersen Genève logo on the cigar band!

The Andersen Genève logo is clearly visible on the cigar band

I asked Pierre-Alexandre during SalonQP whether it was possible to remove the dial display altogether, so that the only way of telling the time was through the lugs. He showed me some renders he had on his iPhone, and while it’s an interesting look, I think you’d need to be pretty brave to carry it off. There is, however, a new ladies version with a domed, pavé-diamond “dial”, called the Regina. Although I haven’t see this model, it reminds me of some of the cocktail watches from the past, with hidden dials beneath a hinged, jewelled top.

Supporting independent clock- and watchmakers.

Spending time with people in the watch industry is always rewarding, and I’m immensely grateful to Pierre-Alexandre and Mr Andersen for the time that they given me over the past two years. When speaking to watchmakers, I often feel increasingly guilty: I’m not a journalist; I’m not a collector of high-end watches; I’m not even an influencer. I’m just someone who loves horology, in all its many forms, and wants to see it survive and flourish.

Without Mr Andersen I am sure that the world of independent watchmakers would be a lot smaller. The Académie he co-founded continues to play an important part in the support and development of independent watch- and clockmakers, through its work and partners (such as MB&F and FP Journe). If you would like to support the AHCI, while also receiving a few benefits, you may like to consider joining the Circle of Friends.

the #watchnerd

 

 

*Dr George Daniels was one of the first members of the AHCI..

** I’d love to do more to support young watchmakers; it’s something I believe is essential to the future of horology and watchmaking. I’m thinking of adding a page to the ‘site that links to young, up-and-coming watch- and clockmakers and their work. I’m also planning a #watchnerd event for next year, to try to give something back to the community. Hopefully, I’ll be able to persuade a few people to get onboard and help out.

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Ayers Metropolitan | Hands-On Watch Review

Ayers Metropolitan

Many people when discussing microbrands talk about how there is no originality sometimes, with the countless Rolex homages, Panerai homages and many more that are available out there and continue to pop up daily. The Ayers Metropolitan, while not being completely uninspired by other brands is a nice breath of fresh air if you will, as they decided to something very different compared to their competition. The highlight of this cushion case wristwatch is the full lume dial that has a two-layer sectioned dial that really stands out, especially in the dark.



Ayers Metropolitan Specifications:

• MOVEMENT Miyota 9015 Premium Slim Automatic Movement


• DIAL & LUME Full Swiss Super-LumiNova® dial, Swiss Super-LumiNova® hour & minute hands and indices.


• CASE 44mm Stainless Steel 316L Cushion Case with Exhibition Case Back


• CRYSTAL (Top) Sapphire crystal with Anti-reflective coating and (bottom) sapphire crystal


• BRACELET Stainless Steel 316L Bracelet with butterfly clasp


• WATER RESISTANT 10ATM (100m)


• DIMENSIONS 44 x 52mm (49mm diagonal)


• THICKNESS 10.50mm


• LUG TO LUG 51.20mm


• LUG WIDTH Internal width 14.00mm and external width 26.00mm


• CROWN Screw-down


• FEATURES Date window at 3 o’clock, Limited Edition engraving


• WARRANTY 2 Years

Price $790 USD

https://ayerswatches.com/



Most of the time I really do not mention the packaging of a watch because usually, it is just cardboard or leather-like box and nothing really special. The Ayers Metropolitan, on the other hand, comes in a gorgeous lacquered wood box that you just don’t usually see with a $790 price tag. It really is a nice wood box, it not only looks great but is solid and hefty and is well made. Also included is a metal warranty card.





While cushion case watches are nothing new, and you can see some inspiration from some luxury watches with the Ayers Metropolitan case and bracelet, the case and bracelet are very well machined and finished, with horizontal, vertical and circular brushing throughout. This is not an off the shelf case or bracelet and Ayers definitely wanted to make a serious watch and paid attention to the small details.



The case and bracelet are mostly done in a brushed finish and you will find just a little bit of high polish under the fixed bezel area and the crown. Normally an all brushed finish is reserved for tool style watches or divers, but the use of brushing patterns gives a nice contrast, especially on the sides of the case and the H-Link bracelet.



Not to disregard the case finishing I just highlighted but the main attraction of the Ayers Metropolitan is definitely the sectioned dial. Full lume dials are nothing new and sectioned dials are not either, though they are not the norm. In different lighting, the dial can come across as bright white, slightly green or slightly blue and that is due to the dial being coated in Superluminova. For this variation, orange Superluminova is used for the hands and markers and I love the white and orange contrast, as usually it is black and orange that is used for dial colors and this is a nice change. Also, note how the brand name is written on a little nameplate if you will and not actually on the lower dial. Ayers kept the dial text to an absolute minimum and beyond the sections, the only other item added to the dial is the date cutout at 3 o’clock.



Getting close up to dial while in full darkness, you can see evenly the lume application is applied to both the dial, hands, and markers. If you want lots of lume and are looking for something different, look no further.



Moving around to the case back, you find another sapphire crystal which exposes the Miyota 9015 automatic movement which has an Ayers engraved rotor. Being a 9015, the rotor is loud and having the exhibition case back makes it even louder, but that is just a quirk of this movement that is otherwise fantastic.



On my 7 1/2 inch wrist the Ayers Metropolitan fits perfectly and that is not something that I expected when I first looked at it, as it has a dual deployant clasp and those type of bracelets I usually struggle to get the perfect fit. Fortunately, Ayers was smart and included two half links on the bracelet and sizing was a breeze due to one piece screws that are easily removed. I removed 3 and a half links to fit my wrist, and the fit was perfect and overall the watch is very comfortable. One thing of note though, because of the crown guards and small crown, trying to unscrew the crown and change the time or the date on the wrist is really not doable, at least for me. I have a slightly difficult time with it off the wrist too.





I honestly did not expect the Ayers Metropolitan to be as nice as it is. I am truly impressed. From the packaging to the case finishing, gorgeous lume dial and the well thought out bracelet, this is a watch that really does punch above its weight. My only real gripe would be that for a 44mm watch, the crown is on the small side and is hard to grasp, at least with my fingers. Other than that, I think they have a real winner here. The overall style is not something I would personally choose to wear every day, but I can definitely see the appeal and it would be something I would grab out of the watch box every so often to change things up a bit. I am looking forward to seeing their second model, which I hope is in the works.