J got me this watch almost a year ago for our anniversary, and it's taken this long for me to formulate my opinion on it, mainly because I needed the experience of being in multiple time zones to test some of the watch's features. Although she bought it for me, I picked it out, wanting to replace the watch that I had worn for twelve years with something a little more stylish, but also with some features that I had always wanted. First among these features was a 24-hour hand. Instead of having an hour hand that made a complete rotation around the face of the watch twice a day, I had grown enamored of having one where it slowly moved around once. 24-hour watches have never been that popular (which is funny, as I thought they would be with the military, at the least, but I suppose they've grown used to using digital watches rather than analog ones anyway), so there were a limited selection to choose from to begin with, at least when it came to new watches (and buying a used classic can be quite expensive). When researching, I came across this watch by Yes that also contained the ability to track sunrise and sunset as well as moonrise and moonset using the digital face of the watch. I'm a sucker for such gimmicks, I guess, and this was the one I told J. that I wanted.

I like the 24-hour hand and have grown used to it, but what I had not expected to get was a watch that didn't have a minute hand, which I haven't grown used to. In fact, I find that I keep the digital display of time up on the watch constantly and rarely look at the hand at all, unless I'm comparing it to the digital readout for when sunset is to give myself a rough estimate of how much light is left in the day. It is that feature that has made this watch worthwhile, especially since you can set two separate time displays on it--a home and an away--and easily switch between the two. While we were on holiday this past Christmas in India, J. was surprised that I was able to set the watch to Hyderabad, not only getting the time zone correct but correcting the latitude and longitude to give me the correct sunrise and sunset. As we traveled north, she said, "Oh, I bet it doesn't have Nagpur in there," but it did, as it did Delhi (but not Agra). The city database seems to cover major airports and some minor ones.

It's a large watch, and quite heavy, and it took me awhile to get used to both the size and the weight. Now it seems natural, but that's after many months of constant wear. And, like most digital watches, the interface to access the features is limited to four buttons, and trying to remember which one to press in what sequence is difficult for features one doesn't use everyday (in my case, setting the alarm, which I only do when I'm traveling).

The extra ability to compute the sun and moon cycles adds quite a bit to the cost of the watch, and if that's not of interest of you, then you probably want to look elsewhere. If I got another 24-hour watch, I'd make sure that it had a minute hand.