Ugly though they may be, these Swatch watches have a trick up their sleeves. Using the same technology found in the Tissot T-Touch line, these Swatch Touch watches are touch-sensitive and allow you to swipe through different functions and control most of the watch features with a simple finger tap.
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Let’s have another look at an American watch brand, shall we? (Please note, Hamilton is owned by Swatch now). Today, I’m going to focus in on the 
Team Earth Auto (ref H60455533). As should be no surprise to the readers of this blog, I’m enamored by watches that have a vintage look to them – and this one is no exception.
In honor of the passing of Nicolas Hayek, CEO of the Swatch Group, we decided to wax a little nostalgic about his most breathtaking – and lucrative – product: the Swatch watch.
Swatch was the brainchild of Elmar Mock and Jacques Müller who were attempting to make the thinnest wristwatch in the world. Instead, they created a simple plastic quartz watch with a movement that contained only about sixty pieces instead of the 100 plus found in Japanese quartz movements at the time. Hayek saw this as an excellent opportunity to create a “throwaway” watch that could be worn for a season and then swapped with another model. Artist and designers bedecked the watches in odd patterns and the company brought the nascent Swatch Group, formed by Hayek in the early 1980s, to the forefront of Swiss watch manufacturing.
At $20 or so, these watches were amazingly cheap and many collectors bought two at a time, one to wear and one to keep hidden away. The watches married high tech with high design and, given their fashion-forward nature, are the precursors to many of the design decisions made today by CE manufacturers. The iPod as an object of desire couldn’t have existed without the Swatch paving the way for inexpensive but highly designed objects to woo the consumer into regular purchases.
Swatch is celebrating the fact that they’ve gained almost 5,000 followers on Twitter, and decided to show their appreciation by giving away one of their watches. Which one? Well, that’s up to you. How do you win? Click on, constant reader, for the details.
Listen in to learn how to win a great Vancouver Olympics Swatch chrono.
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A little bird sent us these images Swatch’s upcoming Tourbillon collection, the Turn to Her and Turn to Him. I don’t have much information but I do know that Swatch used to make automatic mechanical movements but stopped some time in this decade. This new movement appears to use a rotating cage to move the balance wheel in a full rotation around the central stalk, a design decision which differs from the standard stationary tourbillon cage.
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