Welcome back to our weekly installment, where we have a quick look at some interesting watches and articles that have popped up over the last week, as well as taking a second look at what some of our more popular articles this week were. Today, we’ve got some news from the world of smart watches, as well as some maintenance on the more traditional watches. After those, we’ll highlight (as usual) some of our more popular posts from the last week. Read on to see what we’ve got in store for you.
First up, we’ve got what’s probably one of the biggest pieces of news that combined the watch and technology worlds as of late – Google has formally entered into the smart watch (or wearables, if you’re feeling inclusionist) market, with what basically amounts to them doing for a smart watches what they did for smart phones with the Android operating system. For more on this, as well as a look at the forthcoming watch from Motorola, check out what Ariel Adams had to say over at aBlogtoWatch.
While not everyone in the watch world is convinced that the smart watches will truly take things over (I’m cautiously optimistic we’ll see some cool things that complement traditional watches), we can all agree that whatever we have in our collection, be it mechanical, quartz, or otherwise, at least one of the watches will at some point fall prey to some unfortunate casualty. The more catastrophic stuff will no doubt require the work of a proficient watch maker. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t still things that we can take care of ourselves. Take, for instance, scratches in a watch crystal. While repairing scratches in acrylic and mineral watch crystals have plenty of articles on the ‘net, doing that work on a sapphire crystal hasn’t been as common to see. Thankfully, the gang over at Gear Patrol have you covered, helping you save some bucks on what would otherwise be an expensive crystal replacement. source
And now, let’s come back to our own pages. First up, we’ve got one of the latest Kickstarter campaigns to be featured on our pages from Helgray. These offer quite a bit of flexibility (in terms of design choices you get), all from the same case. And speaking of that case, it looks like wire lugs, but they’re actually spring bars, which means you can change out the strap whenever you want to. Check out the article to see what Matt had to say, and keep an eye out in the future, as we’ll working to get a sample in for a hands-on review.
And speaking of reviews, and oldy-but-a-goodie showed up, with one of the more interesting non-traditional watches I reviewed – the QlockTwo. This is really a watch that conforms to how we generally tell people the time – saying it’s a quarter past the hour, rather than, say, 12:15. Unlike other non-traditional displays, however, this one is communicating things (literally) in plain English, so the learning curve is not steep at all. You can read more about the watch right here (and apologies in advance for the photography – something I seem to be doing more and more when I look at these older posts!)
With that, we’ll wrap things up. As always, if there’s something you think we should be covering, feel free to drop us a line. If you bring something up that we end up writing about, we’ll be sure to tip our hats (electronically, if not literally) in your general direction.