Mido Goes Deep Blue Diving With the Ocean Star 39; Bravur Teams Up With Zwift; Kiwame Tokyo's Kubo; Shapiro Reaches For The Sky; UN Releases New Gen Of The Freak [X], Smaller And More Practical

Hey friends, welcome back to It’s About Time. Bravur has been making some pretty cool things with these biking-themed watches. I wish there were more themed watches out there.

In this issue

• Mido Goes Deep Blue Diving With the Ocean Star 39 Abyss Blue

• Bravur Teams Up With Zwift For A Ride On An Indoor Bike Trainer

• Kiwame Tokyo Recesses The Small Seconds With The Kubo

• Shapiro Reaches For The Sky With Tantalum and Meteorite Infinity Series Radiant

• Ulysse Nardin Releases The New Generation Of The Freak [X], Now Smaller And More Practical

👂What’s new

1/

Mido Goes Deep Blue Diving With the Ocean Star 39 Abyss Blue

The Ocean Star 39 might have become one of the best value dive watches Mido makes, and there’s a very good reason why it’s so pouplar: well built, great price, and doesn’t break the bank. The collection's roots go back to the 1940s, but this is the modern version that and this new Abyss Blue doesn’t change anything apart from the color.

The case is stainless steel, 39mm wide, with a lug-to-lug of 46mm that keeps it friendly on a larger variety of wrists. The majority of the finish is satin brushing, with a couple of polished accents. The unidirectional bezel gets a blue aluminium insert with silver markings and a Super-LumiNova pip at 12. A double-domed sapphire crystal with anti-reflective coating sits on top, a screw-down crown locks it up, and the starfish-engraved caseback seals it to 200 meters.

The dial has the same embossed wave pattern from the original carries over, now rendered in a deep abyss blue that shifts with the light. Applied indices, triangle and dot markers, and faceted hands are all filled with white Super-LumiNova. The date window remains at 3 o'clock.

Inside is the automatic Calibre 72, based on the ETA A31.111. Beating at 3.5Hz, it has a Nivachron hairspring for better resistance to magnetism and shocks, a 72-hour power reserve, and is adjusted in four positions. The rotor is decorated with Côtes de Genève. Mido pairs the watch with two quick-change options: a steel bracelet with polished bevels on the centre links and a diver's extension in the clasp, plus a blue rubber strap.

The Ocean Star 39 Abyss Blue is available now, priced at €1,320. See more on the Mido website.

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Bravur Teams Up With Zwift For A Ride On An Indoor Bike Trainer

Bravur makes its watches by hand in Båstad, Sweden, and has profiled itself into one of the only watch brands that focuses heavily on cycling themes. Zwift is the cycling indoor-training platform that turned the suffering of winter base miles into a video game. The two have nothing obvious in common except a love of cycling, which turns out to be enough. The result is a 100-piece limited edition that smuggles a surprising amount of Zwift in-jokes onto an otherwise sober watch.

The case is 37mm wide with a 44.6mm lug-to-lug and 18mm lugs, all in 316L stainless steel with a screw-down crown. The finishing is great: mostly blasted, with polished accents and a brushed bezel top, plus an integrated organic-looking crown guard that gives the profile some character. Compact, comfortable, and sized for people who do not want a watch fighting their jersey sleeve. On top is a domed sapphire crystal with internal anti-reflective coating, and water resistance is 100 meters.

The dial is where the collaboration is focused on. The center has a textured lava finish lifted from Zwift's volcanic world, ringed by a snailed hour track and a luminous "Tron" ring that nods to the in-game reward for big climbs. Look closer and the Zwift references pile up: a watt symbol and feather power-up icon, a thumbs-up "Ride On" applied index at six o'clock, the logo at twelve. Applied indices are filled with Super-LumiNova, the rhodium-plated hands too, and the orange lightning-bolt seconds hand keeps the whole thing moving. It is playful without tipping into gimmick, but it’s till a heavily branded dial so your mileage might vary. I like it.

Inside is the Sellita SW200-2 Power+, the recently updated version of Sellita's workhorse automatic, running at 4Hz with no date and 26 jewels. The reworked barrel and mainspring stretch the power reserve up to about 68 hours. The caseback has a recessed Zwift pattern in orange lacquer with more Ride On symbols, individually numbered to 100. Two integrated FKM rubber straps come in the box, one black and one in Zwift orange.

The new Bravur X Zwift Limited Edition is limited to 100 pieces, with shipping started at the end of June, and price set at €1.395. See more on the Bravur website.

3/

Kiwame Tokyo Recesses The Small Seconds With The Kubo

Kiwame Tokyo is barely a year old, founded in 2025 by industry veteran Masami Watanabe out of Asakusa with a stated mission of "honest watchmaking," which mostly means well-finished dressy watches at prices that don't require a second mortgage. The Kubo is the brand's fourth collection, and the name means hollow or recessed space, a reference to the play of shadow the dial is built around. If you liked the Calatrava energy of the debut Kurotsuki and Usuki, you’ll like this one as well.

At 37mm wide and 9.3mm thick (10.7mm with the domed sapphire crystal), this is the most compact Kiwame Tokyo yet, with a lug-to-lug of 45mm that will sit happily on smaller wrists. The steel case mixes a vertical brushed finish on the flanks and bezel with polished accents on the top surface and bezel sides. Water resistance is not great at 30 meters, but that’s because of the push-pull crown.

The subtle flatness of the dial is interrupted with a great looking subtly recessed small seconds display that’s off-centre at 4:30. The seconds hand carries a counterweight shaped like the great roof of the Kaminarimon Gate, and the pink Sakura version tucks a cherry blossom outline inside the sub-dial. Glossy lacquered dials come in three colours: soft pink Sakura, navy Tetsukon and ivory Usuki. Hours are marked by applied Breguet-style Arabic numerals with diamond indicators at the five-minute points; the lighter Sakura and Usuki use green luminescent triangles at 12, 3, 6 and 9, while the bolder Tetsukon gets a full set of 12 lume markers. All three have syringe hands with blue lume.

Inside is the Miyota 82S5, an automatic 3Hz movement with a 42-hour power reserve, hidden behind a sealed caseback. The watches come on an Italian calfskin strap with quick-release spring bars.

Pre-orders open 21 June 2026 at 11:00 AM JST, with deliveries expected end of July. All three Kubo models are priced at $630 without tax. See more on the Kiwame Tokyo website.

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Shapiro Reaches For The Sky With Tantalum and Meteorite Infinity Series Radiant

J.N. Shapiro built its name on guilloché dials and then went further than almost anyone expected, proving with the Resurgence that an American high-end mechanical watch was possible again. The Infinity Series is the more exploratory wing of the brand, where Josh Shapiro plays with materials and price points he can't experiment with in the other collection. The new Radiant pulls in aerospace metals and meteorite, and it borrows a monopusher chronograph movement that has recently turned up in a lot of interesting watches lately.

The case is brushed tantalum, which is always fantastic. It's dense, almost impossible to corrode, and carries a blue-grey color. At 38mm wide, 9.6mm thick and with a lug-to-lug of 43.9mm, this is a small, flat chronograph, and those numbers are very pleasing to the eye. Water resistance is 50 meters, which is all a watch like this needs.

There are two dials available. The dramatic one puts a slab of Gibeon meteorite at the center, adds a guilloché meteorite 30-minute counter, and rings it with a heat-blued zirconium chapter ring engraved after bluing, with matching blued hands. The second version replaces the meteorite with fully guilloché blued zirconium across the dial and sub-dial, with polished steel hands against the blue.

Inside is the hand-wound La Joux-Perret 5000-4, a column-wheel monopusher chronograph with real pedigree: it descends from the THA movement Journe and Flageollet developed in the 1990s, by way of Jaquet SA. It runs at 3Hz with a 38-hour power reserve. The watches come on an alligator strap, with an optional tantalum bracelet sold separately.

The Infinity Series Radiant is limited to 75 pieces, priced at $35,900 before taxes and duties, with deliveries expected in Q2 2026. The tantalum bracelet adds $12,950. See more on the J.N. Shapiro website.

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Ulysse Nardin Releases The New Generation Of The Freak [X], Now Smaller And More Practical

Twenty-five years ago, Ludwig Oechslin gave Ulysse Nardin a watch with no traditional hands, no traditional dial, and no crown, where the movement rotated around itself to tell the time. The Freak became an instant cult classic, and it took some time to add the Freak [X] to the collection as a more sensible option. It added a crown, shrank the case, and made it more of a daily wearer. For 2026, which marks both the brand's 180th anniversary and the Freak's 25th, Ulysse Nardin rebuilt the [X] from the movement out. The carousel is still here, completing one rotation every 60 minutes for the minutes while a pointer on a rotating disc handles the hours.

The case looks familiar, but it’s radically smaller. Diameter drops from 43mm to 41mm, lug-to-lug from 49.6mm to 47.3mm, and the watch now sits 10.35mm thick, or 13.6mm if you count the new glassbox crystal arcing over the carousel. Ulysse Nardin also abandoned the modular titanium construction for a monobloc case in 80% recycled steel or rose gold, which it says improves rigidity and quiets the mechanical chatter the old architecture let through. I haven’t seen the steel case, but I will miss the titanium. Water resistance climbs to 100 meters with a screw-down crown, which is an absolutely fantastic improvement over the 50 meters of the previous generation.

There is no traditional dial and hands here either, so what you read is the carousel itself. The grey version gets a sandblasted hour disc, the blue a sunburst gradient, the gold a black sandblasted disc. Applied markers have white Super-LumiNova, and the hour and minute indicators and the oscillator bridge are hand-beveled.

The new UN-232 is a brand new movement. It's more compact, runs at 3Hz, holds 72 hours of reserve, and winds automatically with a rose gold micro-rotor, visible through the caseback inside a double-bridge layout with colimaçon finishing. The escapement uses DIAMonSIL for the first time in an [X], paired with an oversized silicon balance and silicon hairspring from the brand's SIGATEC lab. A new quick-release system offers nine strap options with no tools, including an integrated 80% recycled steel bracelet with 2mm of micro-adjustment per side.

The new Ulysse Nardin Freak [X] is available now, with the grey on leather priced at CHF 33,500, the blue on the integrated bracelet at CHF 34,500, and the rose gold on alligator CHF 52,000. See more on the Ulysse Nardin website.

⏲️End links

A bunch of links that might or might not have something to do with watches. One thing’s for sure - they’re interesting

• In 2017, Ernesto Gonzales vanished from his office in Harlingen, Texas. His truck was there; he was not. Three years later, after finally discovering Gonzales’s remains, the Texas Rangers and local police arrested his nephew, but the case (and the ensuing media-circus trial) fell apart in spectactular fashion. As it turns out, that wasn’t the only Harlingen-area investigation that crumbled under its own weight. Now, Lisa Olsen combs through relatives, officers, and the public record to find out what really happened to “El Gallito”—and why.

• Jarrod Tillinghast’s name has always meant violence. His father, a tough guy for the Patriarca crime family, was convicted of murder and imprisoned when Jarrod was young. In the decades that followed, Jarrod moved between the worlds of boxing and crime, earning a streak of wins and a reputation for a punishing left hook but then detouring into robberies, some of them brutal. Tim Struby lets Jarrod tell much of his own story, an approach that could lead to a lot of self-glorification. Instead, he manages a portrait of a fighter whose exercise of power has opened up new spaces for doubt—and, perhaps, transformation.

• For many of us, the fragments of our lives are in the cloud, decades of our private personal data stored forever, whether we like it or not. In this Intelligencer story, Bridget Read examines just how vulnerable we all are. Read recounts individual horror stories, one involving Disney employee Matthew Van Andel, and the 2014 Sony email hack. The piece explores the forces putting all of us at risk: the convenience of cloud storage, the e-discovery industry, and AI tools that now make hacking quicker and easier.

👀Watch this

One video you have to watch today

An Alaskan adventurer and his grandson set out to finish a 16mm film he shot 50 years ago, confronting whether it's better to remember the past, or relive it.

Thanks for reading,
Vuk