Montblanc are treading an interesting path, with a complete new range of entry-level watches in the Heritage Spirit collection alongside the existing Star collection that also caters for people looking for their first luxury watch. At the other end of the scale there are the super-high-end pieces such as the Villeret Tourbillon Cylindrique Geosphères Vasco…
Not long now to SIHH, the watch fair grouping 16 brands, starting on 19 January in Geneva. It’s the first watch show of the year and so provides an indication of the latest trends. Some of the things that visitors will be wondering include the effects that the recent Swiss franc currency variation will have…
While the world patiently awaits for the arrival of the Apple Watch, whose release date is rumoured to be March 2015, other brands are launching their own versions of smart watches that relay a range of information from your phone to your wrist. “We have one more thing,” said Apple CEO Tim Cook at the…
Montblanc has presented its e-Strap, which has a small electronic unit worn on the inside of the wrist and in bluetooth communication with your mobile phone. So it’s going in the same direction as the Apple Watch, but instead of having to wear that uncool square chunk of sapphire, you still have a smart mechanical watch…
The Montblanc Heritage Spirit Orbis Terrarum is part of a new Montblanc family of watches, the Heritage Spirit collection. The watch shows the time at any one of the 24 time zones in the world, by means of an in-house time zone module added to the movement and driving a series of discs as well…
In my experience, one of the practical problems with many conventional chronographs – the ones with two or three subdials for minutes and hours, which often end up looking a bit like a gas meter – is that they are often partly obscured by the minute or hour hand. These hands are usually much larger…
For those who like watches with more than just the date, the Jaeger-LeCoultre Master Calendar and the Montblanc Star Quantième Complet could be an interesting choice. They fill the gap between watches with just a date window and perpetual calendar watches that start at a much higher price. Both these models have the date shown…
TAG Heuer Mikrograph 1/100th of a second chronograph Not many mechanical watches are capable of meausuring time to the nearest hundredth of a second. The brand with the longest history in this area is TAG Heuer, who presented their TAG Heuer Mikrograph 1/100th of a second chronograph, reference CAR5041.FC8178, in January 2011. This piece separates…
This article on the best perpetual calendar watches 2015 look at these challenging timepieces, which require a lot of movement development. A lot of information has to be displayed, and at certain moments, a lot of energy has to be available to change several indications at once. For example, at midnight on 31st December, day,…
Bohème is the name of the new Montblanc collection of women’s watches, jewellery and pens, launched in Shanghai on 28 August 2014. CEO Jérome Lambert, with personalities Chris Hemsworth, Elsa Pataky, Ana Beatriz Barros, Chiara Ferragni, Dennis Nieh, Liu Tao, Dong Xuan, and the new Brand Ambassador Gwai Lun Mei, were present at the event,…
For its watches, Montblanc operates from two manufacturing units, one in Le Locle, and one in Villeret, near Neuchatel. The second is a traditional building, filled with traditional machinery, in which watchmakers still make timepieces by hand, performing just about all operations, including construction of the balance springs, by hand. Montblanc’s racier and more youthful…