The Bell & Ross Fusion wrist watch is one of the few digital and analog watches in the market today. It comes in two different version -- one with a black face and one with a white face. I have the black face one since it defaults come with the black rubber strap. I am considering also getting the crocodile strap as well. The rubber strap is not very comfortable. The watch weights exactly 2.8 oz.
The reason I bought this watch is that I really need a watch that have a calendar display and multiple time zone. Since I don't think/work following the 7 day week I need some reminder from my watch to sync up with the "normal" people, to know what is the current day of the week, and the current day of the month.
I really would like a watch that can easily display four time zones, but that is hard to find. Some of the Casio G-Shock watches has that feature, but it is so hard and slow to switch between the displays that it really is not useful. The Fusion can show one time zone on the analog hand, and simultaneously another on the digital display. That is useful. In fact I now regularly use it to display three time zone when I am away from home.
Some initial observations:
PROS:
The setting of the seconds is different from the setting of the hour and minute. It assumes correctly that you set the second value once accurately, and you only need to adjust the hour and minutes based on time zone changes. You will not accidentally (or not too easily anyway) changed the second setting, so that the watch will always be accurate.
This watch has a single crown/dial to set and change all the modes and settings on the watch. Consider that it has 8 digital display modes of: two time zones, alarm, chronograph, and timer, it is quite a user interface. It works nicely. The crown is digital -- in the sense that if you turn it quickly it advances the hour setting, and if you turn it slowly it advances the minutes setting. Clever huh?
When you use the crown to adjust the analog hand's hour setting, each quick turn of the crown makes the minute hand fast forward or backward an whole hour. Really cool to watch.
The analog time display and the Time Zone 1 digital display can be set differently. So you could set the watch to display three time zones.
For the Time Zone two display, you can only change the hour setting. This is useful since you would only want to change the hour. Note: The English portion of the user guide is wrong. It says "The hours and minutes cannot be modified, they correspond to local time". The Japanese portion of the user guide seems correct.
CONS:
This is a minor issue -- there is no back lighting, so it is not possible to read the time in absolute darkness. However, the large face and the reflective hands are quite readable even in minimal light.
HOW TO USE IT TO CHANGE TIME ZONE WHEN YOU TRAVEL
This is what I do:
- I keep the internal (T1) digital setting to the home time zone (Boston) all the time.
- Normally I keep T2 digital display at my second time zone (Frankfurt).
- When I travel to Frankfurt, I change the analog display to match with T2.
- When I travel from Frankfurt to Tokyo, I change the analog display to Tokyo time. Now I have T1 on home time, T2 on Frankfurt time, and analog on Tokyo time.
QUICK USER GUIDE
All the adjustments are done with the crown, typically pulled and turn with few exceptions:
