What should you do when a knife-wielding maniac tries to steal your Rolex?
Picture the scene: it’s a dark night and you’re leaving work when suddenly a man in a balaclava accosts you, waving a 12-inch knife in your face. Give me your Rolex or I’ll “f***ing stab” you, he yells. This was the nerve-jangling scene that confronted Mark Ewart last week as he left his business, Apple Flooring Ltd, in Basildon, Essex. On his wrist was his beloved Rolex Deepsea Sea-Dweller – he really didn’t want to give it up. CCTV footage showed what happened next. On a whim, Ewart snatched his watch off his wrist and hurled it onto the roof of a nearby Subway outlet. Bewildered, the masked robber grabbed Ewart’s laptop instead and pedalled off into the night on his bike. “I’m shaken up, I’m angry, I feel violated — all of the above and more,” Ewart told London’s Metro newspaper. “What I did was either brave or stupid, I just don’t know.” The 57-year-old admitted he was usually “an advocate for the bravest man walks away and fights another day” but acted impulsively to save his watch. “As soon as I did it, I just thought, ‘Shit, why did I do that?’ “I lived to tell the…
The post What should you do when a knife-wielding maniac tries to steal your Rolex? appeared first on Time and Tide Watches.
The latest generation of the TAG Heuer Connected Watch has just been released and it represents a major and — practically everyone would agree — welcome departure from the tech and mindset of the previous two generations. Simply because it is now powered by Google Wear OS, which allows the Swiss to do what they do best — a dramatically refined and more luxurious case and overall design — and it lets Google run the hardware, with a raft of improved apps and functions, most of which we explore in the video. In terms of the story so far, let’s do a recap on where they’ve come from. It may surprise you to learn that TAG Heuer have actually been in the smartwatch game since way back in 2015, when they released their first generation watch. At the time, TAG Heuer CEO Jean-Claude Biver claimed it to be a raging success. This was the same year the first Apple Watch was released. Connected Watches have been doggedly part of TAG Heuer’s remit since their inception. In 2017 we were given the second generation of Connected Watch, which saw improvements in almost every aspect, from the apps onboard to the screen resolution. The latest…
We may only be three months into 2020, but Seiko is dropping new novelties like the world could end tomorrow … which, given the current state of affairs, does feel ever so slightly plausible. Anyway, I know what you’re thinking: “enough of the doom and gloom, what about the watches?” Well, the Japanese watchmaker has released myriad new timepieces so far, some limited and some not, across their various collections. So we thought we’d round them up, present them to you and then, in a manner not dissimilar from the tasks my former educators had to undertake, give them a report card rating. Let’s hope Seiko has performed better than my scholastic efforts. The Seiko Astron Novak Djokovic 2020 Limited Edition Report card score: A Seiko really came out swinging with their first unveiling of 2020, paying homage to their long-term partnership with current World No. 1 tennis ace and 2020 Australian Open winner, Novak Djokovic. The Seiko Astron Novak Djokovic 2020 Limited Edition picked up where the 2019 edition left off; however, while last year’s Djokovic Astron rocked a black-on-black aesthetic with some serious stealth vibes, the 2020 incarnation was all about celebrating both the colours of the…
Sometimes, a Time+Tide Watches reader will share a small piece of watchmaking history that makes us turn to each other and wonder how we hadn’t know about it before. This is exactly what happened when Colin strolled into the T+T HQ to look at a couple of DOXA watches, with a familiar looking watch on his wrist, with an unfamiliar name on its dial. He was wearing a Sinn 903 Chronograph, which looked a lot like a Breitling Navitimer from across the room but, as he explained, it was one of the unusual effects of the quartz era. In 1979 Breitling saw parts of its company go into liquidation due to bankruptcy, and Helmut Sinn, the founder of Sinn watches, bought the rights to use the layouts of Breitling’s 806 and 809 Navitimer watch dials. This is the story of Colin’s Sinn 903 Chronograph. During the quartz crisis, Sinn bought the rights from Breitling to manufacture the Navitimer, but they couldn’t call it a Navitimer … so it’s identical; it is smaller, slightly smaller in diameter, but it’s exactly the same. There are a few people who just assume that Sinn ripped off the Navitimer, sort of like Steinhart take…