While the entire watch enthusiast community was poised for the luxury Swiss watch companies to announce their latest incredibly dull creations at 2019 Baselworld  (the last of the Baselworlds) Seiko’s offerings shadowed their somewhat uninspiring new models, the Seiko Arnie SNJ025 was one such watch.

Announced by Seiko as a reissue of the awesome H558-5000 series otherwise known as the legendary Seiko Arnie, the SNJ025P1 is a super cool solar powered Ana-digi hybrid. Thanks to the loyal army of fans for the original, it received much fanfare and press. The retro looks of this aren’t too dissimilar from the original but internally there’s Seikos new H851 modern and reliable movement, the best of both worlds for sure, plus there’s a few funky features thrown in for good measure. Lucky us!

After hearing about this particular reissue, I just knew I had to have one in my ever expanding collection. Its somewhat substantial size almost scared me off and I can imagine others would have felt the same way, but once on the wrist it’s 47.8mm diameter, 50.5mm length and 13.8 thickness are soon forgotten, this is one incredibly comfy piece! The crown is of the screw-down variety and the two left hand side pushers have a surround which has to be screwed in before these can be utilised, a very cool feature indeed. Another quirky feature of the H851 movement is the second hand stops at night (or for a certain amount of time in darkness) to save the battery life, (a bit like a FP Journe Elegante). The analog time and digital are automatically synchronised to each other which makes setting the time an easy and very impressive operation. The Seiko Arnie SNJ025 is water resistant to 200 meters and fully ISO 6452 certified, making this one incredibly badass tool watch!