I must say that the first time I saw the YES watch, I was confused and did not know what to make of it. I read the long list of features it had and all the information it was able to provide and was instantly perplexed. I certainly believed all the promised information was there, but I was not convinced that it would be easy to use or understandable. I based this conclusion on my experience with other “information rich” watches, but I was wrong. Take the slide-rule available on certain Breitling watches. You practically need a user guide and training course on how to use that thing. Sure you can calculate airplane fuel consumption, if you know how.

The YES watches aren’t as complex as their rich feature list would have you believe. The computer inside makes things simpler than you’d think, and the information displayed right on the face is what you need to know the most. For a full list of YES watch features, visit the YES Watch homepage here. What I will talk about are those features I find most interesting and useful. Although you can get buried in the functions, setting them is simple enough, and with a slight learning curve, you can easily figure out how to almost anything you’d like to with the yes watch easily.

Look at the face of the YES watch and you will notice two things at first, one large analog hand, and what looks like an LCD pie chart on the face. The first thing you need to tell the YES watch is what city you are in, you can change this on the fly, but it uses this information plus the internal calendar to tell you everything you need to know. The large hand is a 24 hour hand. Meaning that it makes one full revolution every 24 hours. The numbers along the bezel indicate the time. This is also supplemented with a digital readout display of what time it is on the face. This big hand isn’t there just to be redundant, it also serves another important purpose. It tells you how much daylight or darkness is left. The LCD display has many little “slices” on it. Each representing 15 minutes in the day. Those pieces displayed indicate which part of the day is night, and the non-displayed area is daytime. This is an amazing piece of functionality because you get to see how long the day and night are, and it measures how much daylight or darkness you have left. Perfect for those hunting, or avoiding vampires! Watch the 24 hour hand get close to the dark area and you know how long you have until night fall.

I’ve never seen any other watch that can do this. Using the calendar and the location of the city you are in, the YES watch alters this chart each day so that you know exactly how much light or darkness you have throughout the year. In addition to this, you get all sorts of celestial rhythmic information such as solstices, equinoxes, and more things than you probably need to convince you how useful this watch is. How often would you like to know how much day light you have? When the sunrise will be? All this by merely glancing at your YES watch. YES lists a number of activities on their website that the features of their watches would assist with. The bottom line is that you know if you’d like to know this information, it is all about visualizing the celestial rhythms.

You will also notice the circle in the lower portion of the watch face. This is a moon phase indicator which indicates the phases of the moon and are also connected to the calendar functions. Other than potentially indicating the available light at night, it also helps when calculating tide strength, along with other information related to the phase of the moon.

Unlike most gadget watches that feature useful information and complex functions, the YES watch does not look like it is meant to be worn by those who stopped caring what they look like or how they dress. The YES watches come in a variety of handsome designs with high quality steel, titanium, PVD, or gold plated cases and bracelets. You never need to be ashamed to be seen in such a watch. The bracelets are on the wider side at 22mm which is very comfortable and classy looking, and I commend YES for featuring classic case and bracelet designs over something more avant garde. YES made a very good decision in terms of design to appeal to more people than just the die-hard information junkies.

Yes watches come in different styles and designs, all with quirky sounding names such at the Zulu, Tati, Kundalini, Inca, and Cozmo. Get over the fact that you might think the face of the watch is weird looking. Regardless, it is high functional and thought out. There is a place for this watch in the hearts of even the most fanatical mechanical watch enthusiasts. The YES watch is truly an example of what can be achieved using digital watch technology that a mechanical watch can never achieve, and for that reason it deserves respect and a close look.

See what YES watches are available on eBay here.

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