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The latest cellphone and a nice watch have two things in common — fashion and function. Some may argue that there is no need for the wristwatch these days, when all the needed functionality can be found right in the palm of your hand, your cellphone. But, has the watch really been ousted by the phone?
“Absolutely not,” Michelle Detro, a manager at the Buckle in the Newgate Mall, said.
“A nice watch is a status symbol for a man,” Detro’s co-worker Hailey Taylor said. “Women will look at the kind of watch a guy is wearing.”
Despite the sour economy, watch sales have yet to slow down. In fact, it's just the opposite at the Ogden Buckle location, with sales up from a year ago. “Watches are still in. Bigger faces and tons of styles make watches more of a fashion statement than telling time.” Taylor said. “Women purchase watches less for the status and more for outfit coordination, with the hottest watch fashion for women being lots of glitz and bling.”
On the other hand, some just aren't "watch" people.
“I don’t like wearing a watch; it just bothers me to have one on.” Casey Whiteley, IT director for Marketstar, said about his preference to use his smartphone to tell time. “I really like when I go to my cabin where my phone does not have service. Then I don’t have to think about time at all, and I can just enjoy what I am doing.”
A nice watch is a status symbol for a man. Women will look at the kind of watch a guy is wearing.
–Hailey Taylor, Buckle employee
Still, can a cellphone be as reliable as a good old fashioned alarm clock? Gone are the days when business travelers had to set a clunky hotel room alarm clock, or call down to the front desk and ask for a wakeup call. Today, cellphones take care of much of the hassle of setting an alarm. The modern cellphone has multiple alarm functions, from weekday work alarms to beeping reminders for birthdays and anniversaries.
But even with all this great technology, there can be hiccups.
On Jan. 3, the Los Angeles Times reported a flaw with the iPhone alarm system. “Many iPhone owners took to social-media websites such as Facebook and Twitter to sound off on sleeping in, arriving late to work and even missing meetings and planes after recurring alarms set in the iPhone's Clock application failed to go off this morning.” The bug reared its ugly head again in the spring, when daylight saving time hit. From the Huffpost Tech, “This is just the latest clock woe for Apple's chic iPhone. A clock glitch prevented alarms from sounding on New Year's Day, causing slumbering revelers to oversleep.”
There are other drawbacks to using a cellphone as your clock. Travel to the mountains or to Cancun, and your phone may not work or may need to be reprogrammed. Additionally, the life of a watch battery far outweighs the battery life of even the greatest phone. Try tossing your phone underwater and then using it to tell time. In most cases, the phone will flop and a waterproof watch will succeed.
Watches are more polite at the dinner table than a vibrating smartphone and sport a friendly glow-in-the-dark face in the movie without distracting others from the show. Watches are not trying to be a camera or a communication device, or even a mobile connection to the office. In most cases, the watch continues to do what it has done since the beginning of time — tell it.
Amy Wilde is a writer living in Brigham City, Utah. You can read her blog at http://amywildeatmosphere.blogspot.com/, follow her on twitter at wildeatmosphere or e-mail her at wilde.amy@gmail.com.
