Skip to main content

Look Ma, no hands! The Horizon watch discards tradition for daring simplicity

optik instruments horizon white face
Image used with permission by copyright holder

Who said a watch needs hands, and who said you always have to know the exact time? If you’re nodding your head in agreement here, then the Optik Instruments Horizon watch will make your eyes sparkle with its daring simplicity. The watch does away with hands entirely, and gives clear indication of 15 minute intervals during each hour, but nothing more. There’s no ticking second hand, and no bold digital display giving you hours, minutes, and seconds.

Recommended Videos

What you get is a new way of reading the time, which is more in tune with how we speak about the time. Optik Instruments argues that we rarely say the precise time down to the minute when relaying it to someone else, or internally in our head. Instead we say things like “about three thirty, or “quarter past five,” even if it’s closer to ten past or twenty past. The Horizon watch has a single red line on its bezel which points to the time presented on the rotating watch face. It’s broken down into obvious intervals, so you can still estimate the almost exact time, just like we do every day.

Horizon watch face

The name comes from the line on the rotating face, which separates day and night, and also gives it a distinctive design reminiscent of the artificial horizon dials used in aircraft. It completes a single rotation over a 24-hour period, and is adjusted using the crown on the side of the body. It’s otherwise completely free of complication.

We had a chance to try on an early version of the watch, which launched on Kickstarter earlier this year. Watches should be, “glanceable,” meaning a quick look provides the information we need, so we were trepidatious in our approach to the Horizon. It will take a while to adjust to the way the it presents the time, and while the concept is easy to understand, it’s a different matter when looking at your watch for a split second and seeing something unfamiliar. Optik Instruments told Digital Trends it’s common to take a morning to get used to it.

This is an electric movement with a 45-month power reserve. No nightly charging needed here.

The simplicity of telling the time extends into the watch’s design. The body and crown are made from stainless steel with a choice of coatings — we loved the Diamond-like Coating (DLC) coating on the Navigator model — and the face is covered by sapphire crystal with an anti-reflective coating. Despite the Horizon being the first to use a single rotating disc to tell the time, it’s still made in Switzerland with a Ronda 515.24 movement inside. This is an electric movement with a 45-month power reserve. No nightly charging needed here.

Wearable on all wrist sizes

Depending on the watches you’re used to wearing, the Horizon is quite small on the wrist. Its 40mm body will suit large and small wrists, and at 10.5mm thick, it won’t interfere with shirt cuffs. It’s very light, adding to its general wearability for everyone. Also, the simple time-telling system means the Horizon can be worn on either wrist, and it’s designed to operate normally with the crown on either side of the face. In addition to the sapphire crystal for scratch resistance, the Horizon is water resistant to 100 meters, so you can happily go swimming with it still on. That said, the Horizon doesn’t have a sporty design.

HORIZON - How it works

It’s interesting to see how watch makers are playing with time. Recently we’ve seen and been impressed by the SNGLRTY (that’s Singularity, for those who don’t work in marketing) watch with its single hand for telling the time, along with hugely complex, tech-heavy watches like the Sequent Supercharger. These, along with the Optik Instruments Horizon, all shift away from the established “rules” of watch making to give us something new and exciting. As smartwatches continue to increase in popularity and bring attention to non-smart watches, it’s these designs that potentially appeal to many new mechanical watch wearers. We like the Horizon because it’s different, a little geeky, yet still a proper Swiss watch.

However, we’re not convinced of its appeal outside of watch fans. It may be a little too niche for those who’re about to take their first steps into traditional watch ownership. Watch fans will appreciate the bravery in throwing out everything we expect to see on a watch face, and there’s no denying this has been made by people who appreciate watches, and the build quality proves it.

Get it soon

There are four different models being made, with the Navigator being our personal favorite, due to its DLC body, midnight blue/grey face, and yellow markings. There is also the choice of polished, brushed, or sand-blasted stainless steel. Since its successful Kickstarter campaign in February, Optik Instruments has been busily getting the Horizon ready for backers and general sale. It can still be pre-ordered on the firm’s website for 350 British pounds, or around $460, with the watch shipping in September.

Andy Boxall
Andy is a Senior Writer at Digital Trends, where he concentrates on mobile technology, a subject he has written about for…
Withings smart ScanWatch Horizon looks just like a desirable diver’s watch
Withings ScanWatch Horizon green dial.

Withings may have made one of the most desirable smartwatches of the year. The new ScanWatch Horizon puts the already excellent ScanWatch health and fitness technology inside an extremely popular diver’s watch-style case, and it comes with either a blue or green dial and bezel to tap into the latest trends in watch design. Despite mechanical diver’s watches being popular, they’re not well-represented in the smartwatch realm. It looks like Withings has got the design just right for the Horizon.

Made of stainless steel, the case measures 43mm — a tiny bit larger than the 42mm ScanWatch — and is 13mm thick, with flat, scratch-resistant sapphire crystal over the dial. The rotating bezel is also made of stainless steel and has laser-etched minute markings, while the dial has oversize indices and large hands, both of which have a luminous coating. It’s water0resistant to 10ATM or 100 meters. You get a choice of straps in the box, with an oyster metal link band for a stylish everyday look or a fluoroelastomer strap for sport or diving.

Read more
Samsung Galaxy Watch 4, Classic hands-on review: Your choice of sporty or stylish
The Samsung Galaxy Watch 4 Classic and Watch 4 side-by-side.

The Galaxy Watch 4 range gives you more smartwatch choices from Samsung than ever before. It has ended the days of the Galaxy Watch and Watch Active models being separate model lines, and brought them together under the all-new Galaxy Watch 4 name, complete with the highly anticipated Wear OS 3 and One UI Watch software onboard.

 

Read more
Digital Trends’ Top Tech of CES 2023 Awards
Best of CES 2023 Awards Our Top Tech from the Show Feature

Let there be no doubt: CES isn’t just alive in 2023; it’s thriving. Take one glance at the taxi gridlock outside the Las Vegas Convention Center and it’s evident that two quiet COVID years didn’t kill the world’s desire for an overcrowded in-person tech extravaganza -- they just built up a ravenous demand.

From VR to AI, eVTOLs and QD-OLED, the acronyms were flying and fresh technologies populated every corner of the show floor, and even the parking lot. So naturally, we poked, prodded, and tried on everything we could. They weren’t all revolutionary. But they didn’t have to be. We’ve watched enough waves of “game-changing” technologies that never quite arrive to know that sometimes it’s the little tweaks that really count.

Read more