Most use of my phone’s clock app usage is setting 5/7/10/15 min timers for various things and setting alarms to varying times when I need to get going to catch a train or whatever.

I’m looking for a watch that has an easily accessible timer complication so that I don’t need to get out my phone to do those things. An alarm complication (alert at absolute time rather than relative) would be nice too but is not required.

I am not looking for a chronograph or diver’s watch. Chronographs go up, not down, and don’t alarm me when the time is up. That’s the most critical feature to me.
Something like a diver’s watch could be workable (using a rotating bezel to set the timer/alarm would be great) if they alarmed me when the time was up but that’s not how divers work to my knowledge.

I don’t need a luxurious watch or anything, a basic one is fine. I actually don’t want to spend too much. I’m not looking for “collector pieces”, I actually want to wear and use this thing.

Most of what I found online were either chronographs, alarm watches that are not convenient to set (might as well get out my phone if I need to fiddle with it for a minute) or digital watches.

I did find two candidates however:

  • Timex Explorer Easy Set Alarm. It was discontinued a decade ago and they don’t appear to have been very high quality to begin with, so the remaining ones sadly don’t have much life left in them I figure. Also practically unavailable.
  • Seiko “dancing hands” watches. They’re pretty old (1992) but appear to be rather high quality, so probably okay? I’d still prefer something a bit newer. Feature wise they fit the bill but the timer might be a little hard to set efficiently? Unsure how practical these would be for my use-case.

What do you think? Can you recommend a series or have pointers to look into?

  • Curious Canid
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    5 months ago

    Ah, sorry. I would start by putting something like “analog watch timer” into Amazon and see what you get. A lot of them will be wrong, but a fair number won’t be.

    There should be a database for this kind of thing, but if there is, I don’t know about it.