Mido Commander Chronograph Caliber 60

This chronograph by Mido is interesting, it has something of the IWC looks with its 316L stainless steel case, satin-finish sunray blue dial with touches of red on hands and subdials, circular guilloand the narrow bezel. The chronograph dial design doesn’t mess about with things like quarter-seconds or fifths of seconds, but in real life,…

Mido Multifort Lady Mother-of-Pearl

Back in 1934, the first model of this watch was, according to the brand Mido, inspired by Harbour Bridge in Sydney which had been completed two years before. Eighty-one years on, the collection is still going strong. The latest women’s model has a mother-of-pearl dial with vertical strips that evoke the suspension cables of the…

Zero-Sen by Terra Cielo Mare

This is an unusual pilot’s watch by the Italian company Terra Cielo Mare (the name means Earth Sky Sea) which has been operating since 1999. Zero-Sen is a limited-edition timepiece that incorporates a piece of aluminium from a Mitsubishi A6M, the Japanese fighter that the Americans called the Zero-Sen. The aluminium is from the fuselage,…

Mido Multifort Chronometer Calibre 80

This new model by Mido is based on a 1940 piece, but its most unusual characteristic is the new Calibre 80 self-winding movement, based on the ETA C07.621, that provides 80 hours power reserve, over three days. The movement also has COSC (Contrôle Officiel Suisse des Chronomètres) certification that attests to its precision. Like all…

Rado HyperChrome Tachymeter Brown Ceramic Automatic Chronograph

This new chronograph by Rado should be in boutiques ready for the Christmas 2015 season. Its chocolate brown colour is attained through the brand’s mastery of high-tech ceramics, and it joins the other colours previously available for HyperChrome, the original black, then white, grey, and the metallic finish of plasma ceramic. The brown colour is…

Rado DiaMaster Plasma Automatic

Rado is perhaps one of the more under-rated players in the watch industry. The figure of half a million watches per year that can be seen on many websites is based purely on the Wikipedia entry for Rado watches, and I can find no confirmation in the company’s web pages or Swatch Group reports. Perhaps…

Richard Mille RM 63-02 Automatique Heure Universelle

RIchard Mille‘s Heure Universelle was first presented in 2013 as RM 58-01. That was a tourbillon watch. This year’s RM 63-02 doesn’t have a tourbillon, but it shows the same attention for user-friendliness and easy adjustment. Its principal feature is the titanium rotating bezel, which can be used to rotate the cities ring. You simply…

Rado DiaMaster Grande Seconde

This watch’s name, Grande Seconde, and its dial design with two intersecting circles, one small, one larger, immediately bring to mind Jaquet Droz. As they are both Swatch Group brands, presumably no-one minds. In addition to the dial with its Clou de Paris texture and the small mobile anchor that is the hallmark of all…

Rado

Company profile: Rado traces its history back to 1910, when the Schlup & Co. workshop was founded in Lengnau by three brothers, Fritz, Ernst and Werner Schlup, working in the attic of their parents’ house. Over the first few decades of its life, it made movements and components supplied to other brands. The “Rado Watch Co.…

RLT Watches

RLT Watches was founded in Yorkshire, U.K., by Roy L. Taylor, who worked in the watch repair and sales business for almost 20 years before starting to build his own watches and sell them online from 1998. From then on, RLT Watches has sold new and secondhand watches by many brands, as well as their…

Montblanc 1858 Chronograph Tachymeter

This watch by Montblanc is the second, more prestigious watch in the new 1858 Collection presented at SIAR, Salón Internacional Alta Relojería, Mexico City, on 20 October 2015. It is a direct reference to the Minerva tradition, 1858 being the year of foundation of the watch company that Richemont Group purchased in 2006 and allocated…

Girard-Perregaux 1966 in steel

Many prestigious watch brands are engaged in the quest to introduce their products to a wider audience, principally by widening the price fork downwards. One of the ways this can be done is to use quartz movements, and examples include Longines, Corum and Glashütte Original; another way is to use steel instead of gold or…

Longines Symphonette

Symphonette is a new series of women’s watches by Longines. The name is a reference to part of American radio history. In the 1940s, the Swiss watch brand Longines sponsored a series of classical music radio broadcasts named The Longines Symphonette, on Mutual Broadcasting System stations from 1943 to 1949, and then on CBS until 1957.…

Glashütte Original Pavonina

One of the things that has been happening in recent years is an increasing use of quartz movements by high-end brands, particularly for women’s watches. Longines’ 2015 watches for women are all quartz, and Pavonina by Glashütte Original, first presented in 2013 and with new designs introduced at Baselworld 2015, is another example. A lot…

Jaquet Droz Charming Bird

Back in the 18th century, Pierre Jaquet-Droz became famous in the royal and imperial courts of Europe and far beyond for his amazing automatons. The Writer, for example, was a seated boy who could actually dip a real quill into real ink and write something on a real piece of paper. The Charming Bird by…

Triwa Skultuna

Triwa (the name is an acronym for TRansforming the Industry of WAtches) was founded in 2007 in Stockholm, Sweden, and it makes watches, watch straps and sunglasses. The brand’s founders (Harald Wachtmeister, Ludvig Scheja, Didrik Wachtmeister and Tobias Ericsson) and main players are enviably young and cool, and their main focuses are on fashion and…

Jaquet Droz Grande Heure Minute Quantième

When you are designing an entry-level three-hand watch, the question is, what can we do differently? Setting it apart from all the other three-hand watches on the market? In the Grande Heure Minute Quantième, Jaquet Droz provide their own answer, and the outstanding visual feature is the date window. The actual window is the customary…

Unity

Company profile: Unity is a brand that was founded in Barcelona in 2010 by Eduardo Peres. Their watches have distinctive looks provided by the case, with four side lugs (the brand calls them “staples”) that form a diagonal cross-shape, rather like Romain Jerome watches except that they are far more marked and projecting. All their…