Content provided by Casio
When was the last time you had a watch that was JUST a watch? There are (obviously) an assortment of them out there and if you are willing to spend the money, you can literally pay tens of thousands of dollars for a watch that has hands and a face and a band and tells… well, it doesn’t even tell you the time – you have to look at it (old joke but true). Why are all those watches so expensive? The answer involves a combination of marketing, name brand, brand recognition and quality of craftsmanship. For all that, if you spend thousands of dollars on a watch, are you willing to abuse it? Wear it in places that are less clean and more dirty? Get it wet? Bang it on door frames or (potentially) off bad guys? What our contemporary warriors need today is a reliable watch that not only provides the time but also some other information that can be darned useful in unfriendly situations. Enter the Casio G-Shock Master Of G GG1000.
In today’s market there are a number of “standards” that watches can be built to that indicate how rugged or durable they are. There are standards to measure:
Water resistance – typically indicated at what depth the seal of the watch may fail.
Shock resistance – often measured as a drop from a certain height or occasionally given as a measure of foot pounds of pressure the watch’s case will take before something fails.
Scratch resistance – often indicated in loose language about what the crystal SHOULD withstand.
The other very common item you’ll see in a watch’s description is “accurate to within X seconds each X time frame;” i.e. “accurate to within 1/10th of a second every seven days.”
Those are just a few specifications that are quite often listed and seem competitive. There are also a host of other watch characteristics that are almost all purely subjective such as style, size, type of band, color, etc. Lately it seems that bigger is better and the preference is for a lighter shade rather than black. (It seems like that changed when our uniformed services changed from woodland camouflage uniforms to a mix of desert oriented colors.)
In today’s world watches are becoming more and more versatile as well as showing connectivity to other devices – whether they be flashlights or smart phones – to increase convenient use for the wearer. There comes a point, however, where the watch is no longer primarily a watch and becomes a remote control hub for so many other things that it can almost become inconvenient to the wearer. Additionally, it seems there’s a direct correlation between how much the watch will do (beyond displaying the time) and how rugged (or not) it can be; the more it does, the less rugged it is.
Consider for a moment what you actually NEED in a watch and how rugged you need the package those needs are delivered in to be. We submit to you that a watch must, first and foremost, display the time in a readily and easily viewable fashion. While digital watches can do this, chronographs – those watches with hands to point at hours and minutes – are typically more easily seen depending on lighting conditions and the lighting functionality built into the timepiece.
For those working in austere environments, the next two most commonly needed pieces of information are temperature and direction of travel. While there are timepieces that do far more than display temperature where weather conditions are concerned, local temperature is usually the most necessary piece of information for survival purposes. Humidity and wind speed may be good to know, but neither is as obviously important as temperature. The simplicity of information delivery and presenting it in a basic no-frills method is important.
Across the span of decades, G-SHOCK is a name that has come to be respected for its rugged durability and reliability even under abusive conditions. One of the newest additions to the G-SHOCK line, the Master Of G GG1000, offers all of the characteristics and information you’ve come to expect from this respected line. The GG1000’s construction is carefully designed to have redundant protections for the seal of the case and to promote long-term function of the buttons in spite of debris or environment up to the tolerances of the watch.
The GG1000 line is available in four different color combinations and easily displays time, date, day, compass direction and temperature. With luminous hands and markers there is also an LED backlight to provide increased ease of visibility. The GG1000 series is sure to continue to build the reputation of reliability and ruggedness that the G-SHOCK line has become so well known for.
