Timex Takes The Marlin To The Age Of Navigator Chronos; Moser Goes Ana-Digi; And New Watches From Yema, Tutima And Hublot

Hey friends, welcome back to It’s About Time. If you've been reading this long enough, you know how much I love an ana-digi watch. Did I ever think I would own a Moser ana-digi? Not by a long shot, but this thing will be mine!

In case you just got one of these emails and don't know where I've been for the past month, you can read the whole story here.

👂What’s new

1/ Timex Takes the Marlin Back To The Age Of Navigator Chronographs

Timex has spent the past decade turning the Marlin into its all-purpose vintage line, and most of that work has drawn on the supremely cool 1960s. What, however, happens when you look further back? well, you get the Marlin Neo Classic Chronograph, inspired by the instrument chronographs of the 1930s through the 1950s, when a dial crowded with scales let pilots and sailors work out speed and distance on the wrist. There is no shortage of affordable racing chronographs and panda dials. This is a far less common reference, and it gives Timex its most interesting Marlin in years.

The case is new to the collection and it measures 40mm wide and 13mm thick. It's made out of brushed stainless steel with angled lugs, curved pushers and a fluted crown. The lug-to-lug of 48.5mm is somewhat long for the diameter, so some might struggle to fit it on their wrist. Timex fitted a domed acrylic crystal instead of sapphire, which gives it a vintage feel and is always a better option than mineral glass. Water resistance is 50 meters.

The dial is the main attraction here. A spiral tachymeter winds through the center, both sub-dials have their own scales, and a telemeter runs around the edge. The telemeter is the coolest of the functions: start the chronograph when you see lightning, stop it when the thunder arrives, and the scale tells you how far away the storm is. You will likely never do this, but who cares? The colors separate each scale so the layout stays readable. There are two versions: a cream dial with red, black and blue printing and matching blue and red hands; and a white center, a silver hour track, a sky-blue telemeter and orange and yellow accents on the outer track.

Inside is a quartz movement, and Timex doesn't exactly go into detail about it. The cream dial comes on a leather strap with a pin buckle or on a steel bracelet with flat end links and a butterfly clasp. The colorful version comes only on brown leather.

The Timex Marlin Neo Classic Chronograph is available from today, September 22, priced at €269 on leather and €309 on the bracelet. This is a very cool watch. See more photos here and the watches on the Timex website.

2/ Yema Trades the Superman's Mixed Markers for Square Batons On A Steel Blue Dial

The Superman has been Yema's signature since 1963, and the one standout feature over all of these years has been the pretty unique bezel lock system. A small steel bracket sits beside the crown, and when you screw the crown down it catches the teeth under the bezel so nothing turns by accident. Loosen the crown a little and the bezel rotates freely. Yema has a new variant of the Superman, now called the Steel Blue which gets a, well, blue dial, and drops the familiar mix of geometric markers for something a bit more retro, while keeping Yema's in-house CMM.10.

The steel case is 39mm wide, 10.3mm thick without the crystal, with a lug-to-lug of 47mm. Surfaces are brushed with polished chamfers, and a pronounced crown guard follows the case line. A double-domed sapphire crystal keeps the vintage look, and water resistance is 300 meters. The bezel pairs a coin-edge steel frame with a black ceramic insert with a full 60-minute scale.

The dial is grey-blue with indigo undertones and a strong sunburst, so it looks very steely in shade and bright blue in sun. Every hour marker is now a polished square baton with a strip of blue Super-LumiNova down the middle, much like you would find on the skin divers in the 60s and 70s. There's no date, so the ring of indices runs uninterrupted all the way around. The Superman hands are unchanged: fencepost hour, broad triangular minute, lollipop seconds, all lumed in blue.

The CMM.10 is Yema's in house automatic, bearing at 4Hz, with 70 hours of power reserve and is rated to -3/+5 seconds per day. You can see it through a sapphire caseback, where Yema has blacked out most of the visible parts. There are two options for the strap: a black FKM rubber strap with a pin buckle, or Yema's "scales" steel bracelet with a folding clasp and sliding diver extension.

The Yema Superman Steel Blue CMM.10 (ref. 17.26.10.65.SN.U6) is available now as a regular-production model directly from Yema, priced at $1,890 on rubber and $1,999 on the bracelet. See more photos here and the watch on the Yema website.

3/ Tutima Dresses The Patria Small Seconds In Polished Titanium And 18k Gold

Tutima Glashütte is best known for pilot's chronographs and tool watches, but in the past few years, they have been putting a lot of focus on their Patria dress-adjacent line that's very in line with their Glashütte heritage. The Small Seconds is the simplest Patria, and we've gotten variants in gold, steel, and titanium with a pale blue dial. This new version keeps the titanium and goes traditional on the dial.

The case is made out of fully polished grade 5 titanium, 41mm wide and 11.2mm thick, with crown guards on the right flank. Polished titanium is not a choice many brands make, but I dig it a lot. You get the weight savings but lose the matte grey that makes titanium look like titanium. It's quite unique. There's a domed sapphire on top, sapphire caseback out back, and you get 50 meters of water resistance. For a dress watch, 41mm is too big, and a 38mm Patria is overdue.

The dial is new for the titanium. It's silvery-white with an embossed clou de Paris pattern, enough texture to catch light without getting busy. The hands are solid 18k gold, hand-polished with bevelled edges and satin sides. The applied indices and logo are diamond-cut and gold-coated, and the small seconds at six gets circular grooving and a gold-toned ring.

Inside is the in-house Tutima calibre 617, hand-wound, beating at 3Hz, with a 65-hour power reserve. It's textbook Glashütte: three-quarter plate with ribbing and hand-bevelled edges, three screwed gold chatons, and a free-sprung screw balance with a Breguet overcoil sitting under an open-worked balance cock. It comes on a cognac sheepskin strap with beige lining and a titanium pin buckle.

The Tutima Patria Small Seconds ref. 6612-09 joins the permanent collection, priced at €9,400. See more photos here and the watch on the Tutima Glashütte website.

4/ Hublot Wraps the Big Bang Original In Velvet-Textured Rubber

Hublot built its name, at least a large part of it, on the idea that rubber could sit next to precious metals on a luxury watch. There's a lot of people who don't agree with this, and there's been a lot of criticism levied against Hublot, some justified and some not, but I always liked the idea. Which means that I also like this new release. The Big Bang Original Soft Touch, while not using precious metals, is now completely covered in a new textured rubber compound meant to feel like velvet: case, bezel, crown, pushers, dial and strap. It comes in All Black, which nods to the 2006 monochrome Big Bang, and All Red, which references the 2018 red ceramic model.

Underneath the rubber is a titanium case, 43mm wide and 13.2mm thick. Hublot overmoulds the compound directly onto the metal, so this is a textured layer built into the case rather than a spray-on that flakes off in a year. The familiar Big Bang architecture is intact, down to the lateral bumpers and six H-shaped titanium screws in the bezel. Sapphire crystals are found front and back, a screw-down crown is on the right side, and you get 100 meters of water resistance. The real question is how a velvet surface handles dust, lint and sunscreen after six months of wear.

The dial is rubber too, but not velvet. Instead it's stamped with a raised checkerboard pattern that imitates carbon fiber. Printing fake carbon onto rubber is a very Hublot move. The stencil-style applied Arabic numerals come straight from the original 2005 Big Bang and are lumed, as are the hands, tinted to match each color. Small seconds sit at 9 o'clock, a 60-minute chronograph counter at 3 o'clock, both snailed and framed, with the date at 4:30.

Inside is the Hublot calibre HUB1280 Unico, an in-house automatic flyback chronograph with a column wheel and silicon escapement. It beats at 4Hz with a 72-hour power reserve. The strap uses the same velvet compound in the classic lozenge pattern, closes with a titanium deployant clasp, and swaps out via Hublot's One-Click system built into the case.

The Hublot Big Bang Original Soft Touch All Black and All Red join the permanent collection, priced at €24,400. See more images here and the watches on the Hublot website.

5/ H. Moser Releases An Ana-Digi Watch And Makes My Month

I have a real soft spot for ana-digi watches, from the Breitling Aerospace to the Omega Speedmaster X-33. Actually, it's more than a soft spot. It's a bit of an obsession. Sure, I realize that most people see ana-digi as a gimmick, but I'm deeply in love with the format. Now, however, there seems to be a new contender in the market, one that will certainly find its way to my wrist at some point or another. And I know what you're thinking: who the hell would buy a digital H. Moser & Cie.? Me. I would. This is the new H. Moser & Cie. Off-Grid, built on the Mechanic's watch that they made for Alpine's Formula 1 mechanics, part ana-digi, part smart watch, all Moser charm. It's also, if that matters to you, the lowest price entry to the brand.

The case is instantly recognizable as a Moser, at it has the rough shape of the very cool Streamliner. It's made out of steel with either a blue or black PVD treatment and measures 42.6mm wide and 14.4mm thick. Substantial, but from experience the Streamliner case wears much smaller than the numbers would suggest. There's domed sapphire on top and a sapphire caseback, held by four screws, carrying the Moser emblem. Water resistance is 120 meters.

The dial is skeletonized, with the digital display set low at 6 o'clock and a small domed fumé sub-dial at 12 that has the iconic Moser logo done in transparent lacquer. The blue version gets a Blackor fumé dial, the black version a red one. The hands and ceramic indexes are lumed with Super-LumiNova. It's a slightly different take on an ana-digi watch, but one that I like a lot.

It's also a look that may be a bit familiar, especially if you look at the digital display. Kind of looks like the display on Sequent watches, doesn't it? Well, that's because the watch is powered by the D10 movement, which was developed with Sequent specifically for Moser. It's a very interesting movement that has 186 components, runs at 32,768Hz and is rated to ±0.3 seconds per day. Power reserve is 12 months showing time only, dropping to six months with regular use of the other functions. Those functions are what you would expect from an ana-digi watch: GMT with a country selector, a split-seconds chronograph to 1/100th of a second, perpetual calendar, a moonphase programmed for the next 100 years, sunrise and sunset times, a vibrating alarm and a timer. A button at 9 o'clock jumps into the travel-focused Off-Grid mode, which even includes a 10-word dictionary in 21 languages. Bluetooth Low Energy 5.3 connects to iOS and Android, but nothing depends on it. The strap is integrated rubber, white on the blue model and black on the black, with a PVD pin buckle to match the case.

The H. Moser & Cie. Off-Grid comes in two references, 6DI0-1202 (blue) and 6DI0-1205 (black), each limited to 1,000 pieces, priced at CHF 3,900 before tax. Sure, that's an absurd amount of money for a non-smart digital watch. But it's also absurdly cheap for a Moser. And when you compare it to ana-digi offerings from Breitling and Omega, it becomes a bargain. Now, would it have been interesting if Moser went all-in on smart features, with fitness tracking and notifications? I'm not a fan of the notifications. But to go to the gym with a Moser? That would be very cool. Regardless, this is still a very cool watch. See more photos here and the watches on the Moser website.

⚙️Watch Worthy

• A review of the Formex Aria
• Hands on with the Vacheron Constantin Overseas Dual Time Cardinal Points
• A review of the Perrelet Turbine Casino Roulette

⏲️End links

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