In a previous post, I detailed how the Pebble greatly impacted my life. As someone with compulsive shopping habits, I decided to shake things up a little bit and it made for an extremely strange experience.

When Swatch announced the Sistem51 at Baselworld 2013, there was a lot of buzz surrounding it. I was perfectly happy with my Pebble and didn’t pay much attention to it. All this changed when my news-catchers picked up some mentions of the Sistem51 around the time it was announced that it would go on sale in the US. I read a TechCrunch review and it sparked the inner compulsive person inside me. I’ve been eyeing it ever since.

As a person of technology, I am fully aware of the fact that this is probably the worst time in the history of watches to buy a new watch, what with all the fancy Android smart watches and the seemingly imminent Apple wrist wearable thing. However, this decision was made for me in my mind and I couldn’t do much to change it.

I called some Swatch retailers and they informed me that it would go on sale “in August”. Sure enough, on 1st August, it was available at exactly one Swatch outlet in the country. Sure enough, I went there that day. I was initially only going to see how it was. I didn’t have an intention to buy it that day (I swear!). On the escalator that leads up to the store, I noticed that my Pebble strap had broken (pictured below). Surely this was a sign from above. Lo and behold, within an hour, I was a proud owner of a black Sistem51.

Pebble

Here are my initial thoughts on it. I am no expert on this matter, but from what I understand, its specs are super awesome, what with its 90 hour power reserve and 100% Swiss make. It has been machine assembled with extreme attention to detail. It is also super inexpensive for an automatic watch. It is made up of only 51 parts and and its movement only has one central screw. All these are pretty impressive. It’s fairly accurate. Full disclosure: the piece they initially gave me was defective and gained ~5 mins a week, but when I took it in, they replaced it instantly. This one seems pretty accurate so far (touchwood). I won’t go into more technical details because that will expose my shallow knowledge in this field.

The biggest adjustment I had to make was the to re-train my brain to cope without a smart watch. As I described in a previous post, the Pebble had become a part of my iPhone Interaction Workflow™. It has been really difficult to tune that out of my head. When my phone buzzes in my pocket, I occasionally still look at my watch. The watch only shows me the time (and date) and nothing else. It tells my nothing about my phone and that makes me sad. Then I notice how pretty it is and feel better about myself.

When I have earphones on, and if I need to talk to people, I instinctively reach down to my left wrist in an attempt to pause whatever is playing. I realise that this watch can’t do that and cringe a little bit. I need to either:

  1. Take off my earphones and talk to the people. Once that’s done, if I was listening to a podcast, I need to take out my phone and rewind to the part I was at.
  2. Take out my phone there and then to pause it.

I know this makes me sound like a really terrible person, complaining about such a #FirstWorldProblem. For more #FirstWorldProblems, click here.

The other issue I have with this watch is that it ticks. Wait! Hear me out. IT. TICKS. ALL. THE. TIME. Oh, and it’s extremely loud. If there is no other ambient sound, the ticking is extremely pronounced. It is like the watch is being passive aggressive about my time—wasting activities. Tick tick tick, look at you, wasting time on Reddit rather than working on your projects… Tick tick tick, go ahead, StumbleUpon another page. Over time, I’ll tune this sound out, but till that happens it is going to be the best productivity tool at my disposal. (Well, technically, I am at its disposal, as things stand.)

My #FirstWorldProblems aside, I really like this watch. I also really miss my Pebble. This watch looks way fancier than even the fanciest Pebble watchcase, looking at you, Modern. A combination of all these things makes me extremely excited about the prospect of an Apple smart watch (unless it’s called “iTime” because that is a really stupid name). Unlike the Moto 270, that has come closest to nailing down the design and functionality, I trust Apple to get, both, the design, and the functionality just right. Your move, Apple.

Swatch Sistem 51