Top positive review
5.0 out of 5 starsWhat I thought would just be a gimmick turned out to be more.
Reviewed in the United States on September 2, 2016
I always wanted one of these as a kid in the 90s. My father, who was a teen in late 70s and 80s was concerned that I would get made fun of at school because, not only were they more expensive back then, only super-geeks wore calculator watches when he was in school; I guess that still applied to the mid-to-late-90s as Casio Calculator Watches hadn't become old enough to be retro-chic yet. My friend, a 30-something exec, recently bought one and I was immediately reminded of how badly I wanted one as a kid and was ecstatic when he told me it was only $15.
Upon first purchasing the watch, I felt that I would mostly just use it as a fashion statement more or less -- some kind of geek hipster I guess. But I use this thing all the time: Tips on food, BitCoin conversions, tallying my PostMates delivery totals, all kinds of daily math! I have a genuine need for the second time zone too, having relatives and family in another country and I use the stopwatch frequently to time things like workouts and bike rides as well as walking times to all the facilities I use on a daily basis so that I can find the fastest routes (I'm a big nerd, I know). I probably use this watch for something other than telling time around 10 times a day.
I have an iPhone and, sure, I could do all the same things on the iPhone and more than this cheap little watch, but the watch is right there on my wrist! I don't have to take it out, unlock it, and find whatever app I need to use, I just turn my wrist and get straight into it. Sure, I could get an Apple Watch, but I don't see the need to spend $350 on what is essentially a second phone at this point in my life and many of the same problems that come from the complexity of so much versatility would still get in the way. And I can't imagine what using a calculator with such a tiny touch-screen would be like. Even if they're tiny, the Casio's buttons are physical, which goes a long way to being easy to press.
If you are a fan of calculators, geeky things, cheap useful things, or Back to the Future and Marty McFly don't hesitate.
This watch is fantastic. Casio was way ahead of their time in the late 70s and 80s, not with just this watch but all the fitness and calculator watches they produced. This is an icon of an era of extreme leaps in personal computing technology.
Features:
* Watch (either 12 or 24 hour) with day of the week indicator and toggle to see year, month and day
* Basic Calculator supporting up to 8 digits and supporting addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, as well as basic exponents
* Alarm (can also set an hourly chime from here)
* Alternate timezone
* Stopwatch: chimes every 10 minutes, can record multiple laps.
PROS:
+ Cheap!
+ 5 functions: Clock, Calculator, Alarm, Alternate Timezone, Stopwatch
+ Option to have watch chime on the hour
+ Can technically multitask (run the stopwatch in the background while you use other functions)
+ Durable and Water Resistent
+ Alarm is a good volume
+ Keeps precise time (I synced it to time.gov several days ago and it's still accurate to the precise second)
+ Because of it's simplicity, it just works
+ Surprisingly feature-full for such simple technology.
CONS:
- I personally wish the holes in the arm band were offset 50%. One hole is slightly too tight and the next is slightly too lose. That's just a nit-picky personal problem though.
