Reach Out And Touch A Watch

Yesterday’s post on a Tissot model got me to thinking about what originally made me take notice of the Tissot brand.  That was the fact that they’ve offered touch technology on their watches for some time now.  No, you won’t be pinching and zooming on the dial, but you can control quite a few functions with the touch tech.

To showcase this, I’ve settled in on one of the lower-end models, the Navigator 3000.  On the surface of it, it just looks like another quartz watch that has an ana-digi combo display.  Where it starts to stand out are the functions listed around the bezel.  On any other quartz watch, those functions would be printed right near a button that you’d press.

Here, however, they’re indicating zones on the sapphire crystal that you touch.  There are actually six touch zones on the watch:

1. The digital display – touching here displays the local time zone
2. T-world:  display a second time zone
3. Timer:  go into timer mode, or increment in other modes
4. Chronograph: self-explanatory, or decrement in other modes
5. Alarm
6. Date

Just by going through that, you can tell there’s a lot packed into this watch, aside from the nifty touch tech.  Interestingly, for all that, it should be a fairly intuitive watch, as the owner’s manual is only seven pages long.

Rounding the specs out you have a 42mm stainless steel case (12mm thick), a sapphire crystal, a backlight with three intensity settings, and 50m water resistance (just don’t try using the touch functions if the crystal is wet).  All in all, a quite interesting watch, especially when this particular model can be found on Amazon for under $300.