Strange things happen when you drink vast quantities of Wakachangi while recording a podcast with your friends who also happen to be watchmakers. This is how I ended up buying my first digital watch in around 30 years. In a moment of delirium, the three of us decided to get the same watch. It was a nice feeling to do something like this with my friends and I was very excited to share the experience with them. Michael sourced the watch from his family jewelry store Woods Jewelers, so we got them pretty quickly. I’m not really a new watch person, so receiving a brand new watch in the post was a bit of a rush. I was looking forward to learning all the features of the watch and how to implement them into my day to day life as the world’s most famous artisan watch technician. After ordering it I did some research and found out that it was also a connected watch. So I was interested to see how that part of it would work too.

When I unpacked the watch I was blown away by how it looks. Not that it is really my style, but more just how futuristic it looks compared to all my old vintage watches. The watch is pretty much all rubber and plastic except for the bezel. The bezel is stainless steel and it gives the watch its unique look. It is vertically brushed on the front and then it has a matte finish on the sides. It catches the light and contrasts well against the blue-green colour featured on the rest of the watch. It all kind of works with the black LCD display and leaves the watch both eyecatching at times and understated at others. It wears pretty well and seems very well built. Fear not this isn’t thrown together like some poorly built Australian steps, it is built like a tank. I have knocked it off the occasional door handle and it is still working fine. The strap feels nice on the wrist although it certainly doesn’t kiss your skin the way other straps do.

OK so that was all the good stuff. Now for some regulator style negativity. The features are a total mess. As this is my first G-Shock I’m not sure if they are always this rubbish. Seeing as how they are as popular as someone with the surname Woods just before closing at a Colac disco, I imagine that they normally have better functionality. Now maybe I am to blame for this since I didn’t do any research on the watch before buying it. The watch appears to be designed for surfers and as my aquatic abilities are as strong as an Omega Speedmaster with a missing back seal, then maybe this wasn’t the watch for me. The most annoying part is the lack of a basic timer function. I like to wear the watch when I go for a run but every time you use the training function it makes you wish you hadn’t. You press start and then a second time to get the big play symbol on the screen. When it comes time to stop, it gives you the option of resume, save or delete. The watch holds 100 runs but what if you don’t want to save every run or what if you just want to time something for 10 minutes? You need to scroll down to delete every time you are cooking some pasta. When you hit delete a large “please wait” comes up on the screen for 13 or 14 seconds. It’s just really annoying. It should have come with a much easier to use timer. If you use the connected parts of the watch then it just gets even more annoying. Alerts come up on the screen and the only way to delete them from the watch is a process that makes the stopwatch feature feel super usable. The features that I do use on it are the second time zone (great for contacting my mum back home and my far-flung friends) and the step counter so that I can feel like my lifestyle isn’t as bad as it really is.

So in conclusion, should you get this watch? Well it is a cool looking watch. Maybe if you surf then it would be a lot more usable. If you just want an interesting G-Shock that tells the time and nothing more then this could be for you. If you want something that is great for timing pasta, then get yourself an Omega Speedmaster.