Bluetooth stays on only for three minutes and then turns itself off once you're done syncing stuff. I have had one for nearly two years now (ABL-100WE). Absolutely love it.
I feel the same about the apple watch. All I use it for is literally tracking steps. I do not care about any other feature. If my watch fails I will just get a casio watch.
I am not passionate about it but I like to make sure I'm moving a lot. I like that I can at a glance just see how much that's happened each day. I have one of these. Had one a while now and its the only watch I've ever used that I've stuck with and kept using.
My father wears Casio watches almost exclusively, he's been tempted by a Fitbit so he can start tracking his step count, but even though I've bought him the Fitbit, he's finding the whole setup and app usage too intimidating, and so he hasn't used it.
This, in the silver ABL-100WE-2AEF model, is exactly what he wants. Same Casio, same interface, just now it has step count. He doesn't even need / want the Bluetooth.
(Me, I'll keep rocking my Pebble Time 2. Absolutely love it.)
My phone is sitting on my desk now connected to a charger - meaning any pacing I'm doing at the moment it not tracked. When I cook I often set my phone on the counter with the recipe - again while I'm moving all over. I often go to the bathroom in the middle of the night without bringing my phone.
I hate watches, but one would be better for step tracking - it is more likely to be on me to track information.
I do try to get my daily exercise. However it is still interesting to know how many steps I've taken. (sometimes my daily exercise is bike or swimming which are obviously not steps)
People are, absolutely, yes! In the tech world there is an ever-growing focus on devices which can operate independently of smartphones, even to an offline/local-first extent.
The trend is trickling down into other circles as well. People are beginning to correctly identify needless hyperconverged connectivity as a burden rather than a convenience.
Of all the things "smart watches" do, the one thing beyond time that most people actually perceive daily is their tracked steps.
IE; My apple watch ais the only one that goes out of it's way to make sure I know my steps for the day, and is always "accurate". Which is nice, but gimmicky for someone like me who doesn't analyze my steps.
I imagine Casio went after similar low hanging fruit, as an acceleromater is cheap/old tech, while still being able to feature compete with something like an apple watch.
I had this same reaction to past step counters. I keep my phone in my pocket, and it works basically perfectly as a step counter.
But then I realized that many people do not keep their phone in their pocket, especially women. For them, a watch, bracelet or ring really is the best option.
Grandpa kept a pedometer in a little pouch for decades. I got him a Fitbit but he didn’t like that, and more recently another cheap pedometer off of Amazon.
> Step counter seems like a bizarre thing to focus in on? are people passionately tracking steps without their phones?
Yup. I go for walks specifically to leave my damn phone at home. I do bring an Apple Watch w/ airpods in case I need to take an urgent call and for podcasts, but I don't bother with texts or alerts or any other nonsense.
And while step tracking is not critical, if you have health goals that include a minimum number of steps a day I find it incredibly nice to have. I can check my counter before bed, and take the dog for a 30 minute walk if I'm behind for the day. Just a means to hold myself accountable on those crappy low energy stressful days.
It's still powered by a coin cell so it's probably for power conservation reasons. Way cheaper to periodically power on the BT radio and sync steps to your phone than it is to constantly listen for notifications.
It's not just power, if it where, they'd fit a USB C rechargable cell in there.
Its still a cheap casio resin watch at the end of the day. If this where to be able to push/pull notifications, the watch would be completely different in cost, ui, marketing, etc.
It would go from being charming retro tech with modern features, to dime a dozen bloatware/fitness tracking hardware.
If it's anything like my Casio, the watch always initiates the connection.
For this watch, apparently, it's 4 times a day (00h30, 06h30, 12h30 and 18h30), or when the user initiates it with a button press. Only then does it sync (time and steps).
You can see how this probably uses orders of magnitude less battery than constantly listening.
But it works: find my phone is helpful, the watch always has the correct time, and when you move across time zones a single press of a button sets the correct time if you have your phone with you.
That's an interesting take. I wear a non-smart watch specifically because I don't want notifications or any smart features. I wore an Apple watch for years but went back to a dumb analog watch when I got tired of the distractions.
I've been thinking of going back to a smart watch and only turning on notifications for texts from my wife. This so I can leave my phone out of my hands when I'm with my son.
and as someone who want dumb watch you have tons of options compared to someone who just want small watch with notifications which will last at least one month and have real AOD
no such thing besides old Amazfit Bip and overpriced pebble time 2 exists, everything else has either no battery life or looks like brick on wrist (greetings to Garmin and Casio)
If you want a coin-cell powered watch with a couple of years battery-life, but still want notifications, the G-Shock GBD-200/300s have this feature: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCq1ei5cT_8
huge dimensions comparable to bricks sold by Garmin, key new know when Casio will produce something with F-91W dimensions
if I have to choose between used Amazfit Bip for 15-20$ or pebble time 2 with worse (bigger) dimensions, worse battery life (even compared to 5+ yo Bip battery) and not even built in GPS for 200+ $ it's pretty easy choice
One thing I've never understood (and hopefully some Casio geek can shine a light on): why do almost all old Casio models have a 24/12h time switch taking the premium spot as one of the main 4 buttons, instead of having it buried deep in the (awkward) menus. Seems to me that something like alarm or stopwatch setting or a second menu action button would have been far more useful.
In my country, 30-40 years back, people who needed a watch were those ones who travel regularly. And travel was mostly using public transport, trains and planes. Most or all of it operated using a 24h time. So it was very useful for them. That button was very useful.
Compare that to the mute/silence/DND physical button in iPhones today.
Also people who worked in confined spaces who wouldn’t know if it was day or night outside after a days job. My father who worked in an oil rig in Abu Dhabi used one. He gifted me one.
It is a bit strange, like being surprised some countries drive on the left side. xkcd 1053 of course, but people are still allowed to be surprised when someone went their entire life without picking up a fairly common factoid.
You did not know that large parts of the world default to 12h time?
This is absolutely NOT an American thing. I am not American and have never lived there. I am 58 years old, British and Irish, and lived a decade in Nigeria and a decade in Czechia. I have travelled widely around Europe and can get by in 6 foreign languages.
12h time in real daily life is more common everywhere I have ever been. Only minor subsections of humanity -- military people, maybe -- work on the 24h clock.
I learnt English as a kid with the 12h time, but UK friends nowadays say they tend to use 24h everywhere precision is needed (e.g. transport timetables) and less and less 12h in everyday chat.
I was supposing USA was the same. Obviously not.
> UK friends nowadays say they tend to use 24h everywhere precision is needed (e.g. transport timetables) and less and less 12h in everyday chat.
That is the direct opposite of my personal experience.
I do not live in the UK; I live in the Isle of Man, nearby. I visit for work often, though. Yes, the 24h clock is used for things like transport times, but in daily life, written and spoken, it is basically always 12h. I would estimate 95-99% of the time.
> Some advocates of the customary system saw the French Revolutionary, or metric, system as atheistic. The president of an Ohio auxiliary of the Institute wrote that the traditional units were "a just weight and a just measure, which alone are acceptable to the Lord". His organization later went so far as to publish music for a song proclaiming "down with every 'metric' scheme".
Those buttons are the menu. The idea of menus on watches is a modern ux extravagance.
I don’t have the satisfying answer as to why they dedicated a button to 12/24 hour time but my guess is that it’s simply a cool digital feature and stands out against the limitations of analog watches.
I always followed trial and error until I reached my target and I had the feeling that my results were much better than if I were randomly clicking buttons. That is, some memory always remained. Or the menu is well thought out and has some consistency.
The button press sequences are still combo-style; when I set one of the alarms on my ABL-100WE, it always ends in trial and error. I mean, basically it's logical, but when the buttons change what they do (e.g. when the display says "SET", the light button becomes "up"), it throws me off.
They had modal menus back then, they just didn't display them. You had to memorize which obscure symbols to press, to change various settings. For example, in the 1970's, HP's calculator watch required pressing ⯅• to switch between 12 hr and 24 hr modes, or A⯅A to clear an alarm.
In the 80's and 90's, when sixteen-segment and dot-matrix displays made displaying text easier, calculators started displaying menu items, so you didn't have to memorize the sequence.
Since then, we've moved on to full-color high-resolution displays that can handle any text of any language, and the menus have more-or-less switched back to memorizing a sequence of which obscure symbols to press, I guess because some people think they look cool? Sometimes there's no menu at all, and you just have to memorize finger movements.
You can bury stuff like setting the time into a menu, people will accept it. They know that there will be a way to set the time. But if the 12/24 is hidden, whatever is picked as the default will drive away a noticeable fraction of those would-be buyers who prefer the other setting. For starters, pretty much everybody who does not get pulled into a sales person interaction that's sufficiently deep to touch the subject. And that sales person interaction won't be the best possibly, you don't want to bore them with nuisance settings, you want to show off The Stopwatch (or whatever was the flagship feature of the watch in question)
I don't know what clever jiggery-pokery you are trying to do, but whatever you typed, it's just turning to tofu on this Macbook, in both Chrome and Firefox.
There are menus on these watches, though. On the F91w the menu button flips through different setting modes which affect the function of the other buttons.
I spoke with a Casio engineer about this. It's so that your bending wrist can accidentally switch it to 12h time when you actually really want it on 24h time or vice versa.
They could just set it to 12h mode for americans and 24h mode for the rest of the world, and hid the setting somewhere deep in the menus (hold this button for 3s, then press that button 5 times, and then the other button two times, etc.), so you could change it from american to normal display if needed, and never again press it by accident.
My F-91F I replaced the Casio module with an Ollee watch and pretty much disabled all of the features, I can sync the time when reconnecting to Bluetooth on my phone which I do about once a month.
Wearing a Casio as I type this. The "24hr" button switches 12/24 modes on the "watch" mode, when using stopwatch it starts the watch, and when using alarms it turns the alarm on/off.
It has pretty critical functionality for those, I think the way its labeled on the watch face just makes it sound a little odd.
Now that I think I can't very fast come up with any feature I would want to have on third button in clock display mode. UI is 3 buttons, light, mode and one mode dependant. So I can't think what you would use it for in clock mode. So better have it work, but do something inconsequential...
A watch like the F-91W is a bit wonky in terms of the buttons. You're right the 24/12h makes no sense, who needs to switch between those two options regularly? The backlight button is also questionable, because it's not entirely clear what you're suppose to gain by vaguely illuminating the first 20% of display, which will be empty from midnight until 20:00.
It has to be extremely dark though, or maybe mine has a worse than normal backlight. Other models are much better, it's just the F-91W.
The fact that Casio is well aware that the backlight is just terrible, but haven't fixed it in close to 40 years is hilarious and just makes me love it even more.
And you specifically have an F91W? In pitch black, it maybe illuminates 2/3 of the screen for me. I can't imagine using it as a flashlight! But mine is newer, maybe the older ones have better lights.
For a very long time, China and India used a mixture of the 12-hour and 24-hour formats, which meant they had to convert the time or switch between time formats multiple times par day. That was the intended use of this button.
Both countries have now officially switched to the 24-hour format.
I'm skeptical. Switching between time formats when you're used to it requires 0 cognitive effort, and certainly doesn't warrant a button. Eg in France, people use 24h time for display but talk in either 12h or 24h time depending on personal preference, so you might look at "17:00" and say "5" without even thinking about it, it's just a different name for 17.
It doesn't take long to learn to interchange. If you start today you won't be doing it tommorow, but if you keep it up in a few months you will. At least for the common times - you might have to think about what 10pm is if you normally go to bed before then.
It’s not quite the same when a schoolchild or a farmer has to figure out different train timetable formats depending on the railway company. It was the 1980s, and these were the first affordable watches available…
The SNCF doesn’t change its format when you travel to Brittany or Alsace.
Here is a fun fact; the US believes owning and wearing an F-91W is evidence that you're a terrorist so much so that they can place you in Guantanamo Bay without trial[0]:
> In a handful of cases the detainee's possession of a Casio watch or the wearing olive-drab clothing is cited as evidence that the detainee is an enemy combatant. No basis is given to explain why such evidence makes the detainee an enemy combatant.
The wording doesn’t seem to me like owning the watch was the only evidence and that was enough to put people in Guantanamo, it sounds to me like it was a contributing factor. Still a bit crazy but I don’t think they just arrested everyone with this watch.
> the US believes owning and wearing an F-91W is evidence that you're a terrorist
No they don't, please don't spread misinformation. If this were true, the watch itself would be banned in the country and/or nobody would sell it.
Your own source says the Pentagon refuted the author's claims because they did not have access to classified information, which I believe would suggest that there is more to the story than merely owning a very common watch and nothing else. Otherwise millions of innocent Americans would be in jail.
There is a very, very good reason this was only "in a handful of cases" and never again.
It's not quite as simple as "if you have one of these you're a terrorist" of course; it's one indicator based on long-standing patterns, but never sole proof.
AQ training/bomb-making manuals from the 1990s–2000s recommend cheap, reliable digital watches like this as timers for IEDs as they're extremely inexpensive and widely available worldwide, durable, water resistant, and easy to modify as delay timers.
Often these guys would get picked up with two or more watches of the same model, for example. We recovered them in bomb-making facilities and on fighters throughout the GWOT. Ramzi Yousef (Philippine Airlines Flight 434) and Ahmed Ressam (the 'Millennium Bomber') both had them.
> Ramzi Yousef (Philippine Airlines Flight 434) and Ahmed Ressam (the 'Millennium Bomber') both had them.
This is like a statistics 101 question. Google says that Casio has sold over 100M F-91W's since 1989. Let's round down to an average of 2.5M a year, or 25M over the 10 peak years of the global war on terror (GWOT).
You named two terrorists who wore them. Let's say that's an understatement by 200X. Some quick math shows that the percent of terrorists who wore F-91W's is 400/25000000 = 0.0016% positive rate, or conversely a 99.9984% false positive rate. Not good!
Now I never actually took a statistics class, so maybe I got this question wrong. But it's obvious that using the possession of an F-91W as a sign of being a terrorist is a mistake.
Well, your argument might be valid but calculation of course has nothing remotely to do with truth. If we’re talking about the US, person has to be in the US/travel to US. That dramatically cuts down the amount from 25M. Second - the person has to be.. how do I put it, non white? Probably muslim. That also cuts it down by far. I can believe that people who fall in these two categories might have some subcultural groups. And in most of them they might just.. not wear Casio watches. It’s not like probability of wearing/not wearing Casio watches is equally likely for every person on earth. They have their target groups.
> Khaled El-Masri is a German, Lebanese and French citizen who was mistakenly abducted by the Macedonian police in 2003, and handed over to the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
> While in CIA custody, he was flown to Afghanistan, where he was held at a black site and routinely interrogated, beaten, strip-searched, raped, and subjected to other forms of torture.
> After El-Masri held hunger strikes, and was detained for four months in the "Salt Pit", the CIA admitted his arrest was a mistake and released him.
Trick question! It was actually that his name is one letter away from someone else's name, and some manager in the CIA had "a hunch":
> At the end of 2003, El-Masri travelled from his home in Ulm to go on a short vacation in Skopje. He was detained by Macedonian border officials on 31 December 2003, because his name was identical (except for variations in Roman transliteration) to that of Khalid al-Masri, who was being sought as an alleged mentor to the al-Qaeda Hamburg cell, and because of suspicion that El-Masri's German passport was a forgery.
> CIA agents discussed whether to remove El-Masri from Macedonia through an extraordinary rendition. The decision to do so was made by the head of the al Qaeda division of the CIA's Counter-Terrorism Center, Alfreda Frances Bikowsky, on the basis of "a hunch" that El-Masri was involved in terrorism; his name was similar to suspected terrorist Khalid al-Masri.
> When the Macedonian officials released El-Masri on 23 January 2004, American security officers immediately kidnapped him. El-Masri later described them as members of a "black snatch team." They beat him and sedated him for transport using a rectal suppository. "The CIA stripped, hooded, shackled and sodomized el-Masri with a suppository—in CIA parlance, subjected him to "capture shock"—as Macedonian officials stood by."
> In a handful of cases the detainee's possession of a Casio watch or the wearing olive-drab clothing is cited as evidence that the detainee is an enemy combatant. No basis is given to explain why such evidence makes the detainee an enemy combatant.
Nice move! I wish it would support even more activity / health features in the future like GPS tracking, sleep tracking, etc. As a full package in the classic design it would make a great alternative to Garmin / Polar / Whoop / Oura etc.
I'll take some solace in mine supporting lots more alarms (beep when school recess ends) and a bunch of geeky stuff like sunrise, moon phases, tides, and stuff.
I'm pretty positive that the Sensor Watch is not "super accurate" or more accurate than pretty much any Casio. This is discussed a lot on their Discord. Having said that, I love my F91W/SWPro (as I explicate in a separate comment) but precision isn't its strength ... it's precise enough for me anyway.
Like their G-Shock watches, the actual area dedicated to showing the time is overwhelmed by superfluous elements. Must be barely 20% of the top surface that actually performs its primary function.
When I look at my watch I want to see the time, not wasted space announcing "Casio Step Tracker" or "Water Resist" ( which isn't even proper English).
I moved to Timex a few years ago as their basic digital watches have nice big numerals for the time display.
On the principal menu of my G-Shock, I have the time on ~80% of the screen. The rest is 8/19, WED and the seconds. Of course the time is smaller when I go to the tide screen.
There are some editions of their models which don't have any of those labels and they look much better. But I think they never went far enough, and design a good looking digital g-shock with big time and date, nothing else. When I was younger, small time display was fine, but now as someone with presbyopia (like any 40+ adult) those digits are just too small.
Really hoping this will include the ability to sync information from the internet via the BT tethered phone. But probably not
Similar to the current weather feature that grabs the weather for the next 5 days on every sync, I just want to push the local time train schedule just once per day to my watch.
The movement firmware is open source and it has tons of features. Highlights include temperature compensation for seconds per year accuracy, and a TOTP generator that lets you login like you're James Bond.
People have written orbital calculators for this thing. Even the Chrome jumpy dinosaur game got ported.
I have one of these, there is an open source project called gshock_api that supports it. I think that makes it a much more interesting device. I don't use the app, I tag alarms in remind, and sync them from cron - works great.
This is great, as is the CasioGShockSmartSync Android app. I wish there was an iOS app, as the official app is horrible, only works after signing up for an account, and only works if given every tracking permission possible to vacuum the maximum amount of data to the cloud.
i love the product design aspect of a product that only needs to have one thing set (in this case, the time zone), to be eternally a functional device
which is why i love gshocks, both for design but also specifically the ones with tough solar/multiband 6 (and bluetooth (optional))
they have battery lives in the range of decades (due to solar charging), set themselves (multiband 6 is using atomic clock radio signals) and via bluetooth
you can get gw-b5600-2 and gw-s5600u (auto backlight) for under $200, but usually closer to $100. there are many more models, of course
that sounds expensive, but it's insanely durable construction and battery life means it'll be the only digital watch you'll ever need to buy. and the only configuration it will ever need is the time zone.
The batteries the gshocks use goes for about $15 or less.
Regular batteries may be a better deal but that doesn't include the process of opening the watch, replacing the battery, and then resealing the case.
I'll trade $15 and a 15 minute job once every 15 years for a 15 minute job every 5 years. And no watch with a regular battery will have auto-backlight (for the obvious reason).
And also... if you want a deal, don't buy a $100 watch with auto backlight, capable of setting its own time off of a radio, and capable of ringing your phone when you can't find it.
I service my watches every five years to keep them waterproof. And at that point I always replace the $1 battery, regardless of its condition. That way my watches are always operational.
I feel that the smartphone connectivity feature is a departure from the philosophy of the F-91W. Is having a smartphone for "Easy watch setting" not a flaw of the watch, rather than a feature?
I'd love if it was radio controlled and charged with solar. And without phone connectivity.
After wearing an Apple Watch for almost a decade, the F-91W became my new "never take off" watch. For daily use, the only thing I miss from a smartwatch is a weather+temp forecast complication. Interestingly, it doesn't seem like this F-B100W-1A provides that (yet).
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[ 0.38 ms ] story [ 19.0 ms ] threadMight take another look at these - given the price, it's not a huge gamble to try it out for a few weeks.
Indiglo WATER RESIST 69m ALARM Chronograph
This, in the silver ABL-100WE-2AEF model, is exactly what he wants. Same Casio, same interface, just now it has step count. He doesn't even need / want the Bluetooth.
(Me, I'll keep rocking my Pebble Time 2. Absolutely love it.)
I hate watches, but one would be better for step tracking - it is more likely to be on me to track information.
I do try to get my daily exercise. However it is still interesting to know how many steps I've taken. (sometimes my daily exercise is bike or swimming which are obviously not steps)
The trend is trickling down into other circles as well. People are beginning to correctly identify needless hyperconverged connectivity as a burden rather than a convenience.
IE; My apple watch ais the only one that goes out of it's way to make sure I know my steps for the day, and is always "accurate". Which is nice, but gimmicky for someone like me who doesn't analyze my steps.
I imagine Casio went after similar low hanging fruit, as an acceleromater is cheap/old tech, while still being able to feature compete with something like an apple watch.
But then I realized that many people do not keep their phone in their pocket, especially women. For them, a watch, bracelet or ring really is the best option.
Tracking steps helps me stay on track.
The least apps on my phone, the better. And the least I've got my phone on me, the better. I often leave the house without taking my phone.
I don't track my steps but the wife does... Using a watch.
Why do you automatically assume everybody on earth is as tied to his phone as you are?
Yup. I go for walks specifically to leave my damn phone at home. I do bring an Apple Watch w/ airpods in case I need to take an urgent call and for podcasts, but I don't bother with texts or alerts or any other nonsense.
And while step tracking is not critical, if you have health goals that include a minimum number of steps a day I find it incredibly nice to have. I can check my counter before bed, and take the dog for a 30 minute walk if I'm behind for the day. Just a means to hold myself accountable on those crappy low energy stressful days.
so I guess I'm staying on my third Amazfit Bip since Pebble Time 2 has insane price
Its still a cheap casio resin watch at the end of the day. If this where to be able to push/pull notifications, the watch would be completely different in cost, ui, marketing, etc.
It would go from being charming retro tech with modern features, to dime a dozen bloatware/fitness tracking hardware.
For this watch, apparently, it's 4 times a day (00h30, 06h30, 12h30 and 18h30), or when the user initiates it with a button press. Only then does it sync (time and steps).
You can see how this probably uses orders of magnitude less battery than constantly listening.
But it works: find my phone is helpful, the watch always has the correct time, and when you move across time zones a single press of a button sets the correct time if you have your phone with you.
no such thing besides old Amazfit Bip and overpriced pebble time 2 exists, everything else has either no battery life or looks like brick on wrist (greetings to Garmin and Casio)
It's not great... but it's something?
if I have to choose between used Amazfit Bip for 15-20$ or pebble time 2 with worse (bigger) dimensions, worse battery life (even compared to 5+ yo Bip battery) and not even built in GPS for 200+ $ it's pretty easy choice
pebble PR team enjoy downvoting me
The ABL-100WE has an orange light that stays on for either 1.5 or 3 seconds (configurable) and provides some decent light.
The display contrast doesn't seem to be quite as good as it used to be with older movements, though.
Also people who worked in confined spaces who wouldn’t know if it was day or night outside after a days job. My father who worked in an oil rig in Abu Dhabi used one. He gifted me one.
This was 1998.
It’s a little strange that a dedicated button would be needed to switch between them, especially when the math to convert between them is so simple.
You did not know that large parts of the world default to 12h time?
This is absolutely NOT an American thing. I am not American and have never lived there. I am 58 years old, British and Irish, and lived a decade in Nigeria and a decade in Czechia. I have travelled widely around Europe and can get by in 6 foreign languages.
12h time in real daily life is more common everywhere I have ever been. Only minor subsections of humanity -- military people, maybe -- work on the 24h clock.
That is the direct opposite of my personal experience.
I do not live in the UK; I live in the Isle of Man, nearby. I visit for work often, though. Yes, the 24h clock is used for things like transport times, but in daily life, written and spoken, it is basically always 12h. I would estimate 95-99% of the time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_customary_units
Ooh that explains a lot.
24 hour time is used extensively for in the UK. For example all public transport used 24 hour time for travel.
I don’t have the satisfying answer as to why they dedicated a button to 12/24 hour time but my guess is that it’s simply a cool digital feature and stands out against the limitations of analog watches.
A few months without doing them, and it was hopeless trying to remember how to do them again.
15 beeps, btw, till it turns itself off for the day.
One thing I miss that’s not on my Fitbit is an hourly warning. When you have ADHD, it’s a huge helper.
Press MODE, then press ALARM ON/OFF.
The beauty of them is that I can pick up any casio model from any year and I know how it works.
That my friend is peak design.
In the 80's and 90's, when sixteen-segment and dot-matrix displays made displaying text easier, calculators started displaying menu items, so you didn't have to memorize the sequence.
Since then, we've moved on to full-color high-resolution displays that can handle any text of any language, and the menus have more-or-less switched back to memorizing a sequence of which obscure symbols to press, I guess because some people think they look cool? Sometimes there's no menu at all, and you just have to memorize finger movements.
I don't know what clever jiggery-pokery you are trying to do, but whatever you typed, it's just turning to tofu on this Macbook, in both Chrome and Firefox.
They could just set it to 12h mode for americans and 24h mode for the rest of the world, and hid the setting somewhere deep in the menus (hold this button for 3s, then press that button 5 times, and then the other button two times, etc.), so you could change it from american to normal display if needed, and never again press it by accident.
Name checks out.
It has pretty critical functionality for those, I think the way its labeled on the watch face just makes it sound a little odd.
The fact that Casio is well aware that the backlight is just terrible, but haven't fixed it in close to 40 years is hilarious and just makes me love it even more.
Both countries have now officially switched to the 24-hour format.
The SNCF doesn’t change its format when you travel to Brittany or Alsace.
> In a handful of cases the detainee's possession of a Casio watch or the wearing olive-drab clothing is cited as evidence that the detainee is an enemy combatant. No basis is given to explain why such evidence makes the detainee an enemy combatant.
This is also noted on the F-91W's Wikipedia page:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casio_F-91W#Usage_in_terrorism
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seton_Hall_reports#Detainees'_...
No they don't, please don't spread misinformation. If this were true, the watch itself would be banned in the country and/or nobody would sell it.
Your own source says the Pentagon refuted the author's claims because they did not have access to classified information, which I believe would suggest that there is more to the story than merely owning a very common watch and nothing else. Otherwise millions of innocent Americans would be in jail.
There is a very, very good reason this was only "in a handful of cases" and never again.
AQ training/bomb-making manuals from the 1990s–2000s recommend cheap, reliable digital watches like this as timers for IEDs as they're extremely inexpensive and widely available worldwide, durable, water resistant, and easy to modify as delay timers.
Often these guys would get picked up with two or more watches of the same model, for example. We recovered them in bomb-making facilities and on fighters throughout the GWOT. Ramzi Yousef (Philippine Airlines Flight 434) and Ahmed Ressam (the 'Millennium Bomber') both had them.
This is like a statistics 101 question. Google says that Casio has sold over 100M F-91W's since 1989. Let's round down to an average of 2.5M a year, or 25M over the 10 peak years of the global war on terror (GWOT).
You named two terrorists who wore them. Let's say that's an understatement by 200X. Some quick math shows that the percent of terrorists who wore F-91W's is 400/25000000 = 0.0016% positive rate, or conversely a 99.9984% false positive rate. Not good!
Now I never actually took a statistics class, so maybe I got this question wrong. But it's obvious that using the possession of an F-91W as a sign of being a terrorist is a mistake.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khalid_El-Masri
> Khaled El-Masri is a German, Lebanese and French citizen who was mistakenly abducted by the Macedonian police in 2003, and handed over to the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
> While in CIA custody, he was flown to Afghanistan, where he was held at a black site and routinely interrogated, beaten, strip-searched, raped, and subjected to other forms of torture.
> After El-Masri held hunger strikes, and was detained for four months in the "Salt Pit", the CIA admitted his arrest was a mistake and released him.
Trick question! It was actually that his name is one letter away from someone else's name, and some manager in the CIA had "a hunch":
> At the end of 2003, El-Masri travelled from his home in Ulm to go on a short vacation in Skopje. He was detained by Macedonian border officials on 31 December 2003, because his name was identical (except for variations in Roman transliteration) to that of Khalid al-Masri, who was being sought as an alleged mentor to the al-Qaeda Hamburg cell, and because of suspicion that El-Masri's German passport was a forgery.
> CIA agents discussed whether to remove El-Masri from Macedonia through an extraordinary rendition. The decision to do so was made by the head of the al Qaeda division of the CIA's Counter-Terrorism Center, Alfreda Frances Bikowsky, on the basis of "a hunch" that El-Masri was involved in terrorism; his name was similar to suspected terrorist Khalid al-Masri.
> When the Macedonian officials released El-Masri on 23 January 2004, American security officers immediately kidnapped him. El-Masri later described them as members of a "black snatch team." They beat him and sedated him for transport using a rectal suppository. "The CIA stripped, hooded, shackled and sodomized el-Masri with a suppository—in CIA parlance, subjected him to "capture shock"—as Macedonian officials stood by."
Or more recently, to some officials, showing up at a No Kings rally.
doesn't mean others can't want a smart casio, but, it's not for me :D
I'll take some solace in mine supporting lots more alarms (beep when school recess ends) and a bunch of geeky stuff like sunrise, moon phases, tides, and stuff.
When I look at my watch I want to see the time, not wasted space announcing "Casio Step Tracker" or "Water Resist" ( which isn't even proper English).
I moved to Timex a few years ago as their basic digital watches have nice big numerals for the time display.
That said, I really like this because the ABL-100WE comes with metal bands and I'd really like another watch with a rubber band :)
https://www.casio.com/de/watches/casio/vintage/product.ABL-1...
F-91W (old): 38.2 × 35.2 × 8.5 mm
F-B100W-1A (new): 41.9 × 38.1 × 8.8 mm
https://www.olleewatch.com/
Similar to the current weather feature that grabs the weather for the next 5 days on every sync, I just want to push the local time train schedule just once per day to my watch.
https://www.sensorwatch.net
Use it every day at work. Makes counting respiratory frequency painless.
People have written orbital calculators for this thing. Even the Chrome jumpy dinosaur game got ported.
Is it did that get implemented solely so someone could say "I'll make my own watch, with blackjack and hookers"?
https://github.com/izivkov/gshock_api
The full lifelog (what Casio calls the steps and other metrics) is an opaque binary blob, but we mostly understand it now, so you can access that too.
https://github.com/izivkov/gshock_api/pull/3
which is why i love gshocks, both for design but also specifically the ones with tough solar/multiband 6 (and bluetooth (optional))
they have battery lives in the range of decades (due to solar charging), set themselves (multiband 6 is using atomic clock radio signals) and via bluetooth
you can get gw-b5600-2 and gw-s5600u (auto backlight) for under $200, but usually closer to $100. there are many more models, of course
that sounds expensive, but it's insanely durable construction and battery life means it'll be the only digital watch you'll ever need to buy. and the only configuration it will ever need is the time zone.
Regular batteries may be a better deal but that doesn't include the process of opening the watch, replacing the battery, and then resealing the case.
I'll trade $15 and a 15 minute job once every 15 years for a 15 minute job every 5 years. And no watch with a regular battery will have auto-backlight (for the obvious reason).
And also... if you want a deal, don't buy a $100 watch with auto backlight, capable of setting its own time off of a radio, and capable of ringing your phone when you can't find it.
F91W will do! That's why they're so popular!
I'd love if it was radio controlled and charged with solar. And without phone connectivity.
https://www.casio.com/us/watches.filter.solar-radio_adjust-K...