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When most of us consider impossible-to-use timepieces, Tokyoflash is the first brand to come to mind. Well now there's a worthy challenger, as the Chronochrome probably can't be deciphered without a cheat sheet.
Gizmodo Gallery visitors got a great sneak peek at Tokyoflash's new watch, the Kisai Tenmetsu, which presents time using tri-coloured LEDs in Tokyoflash's per usual esoteric fashion. If that floated your boat, it's available now on the company's website.
Oh Tokyoflash, how you challenge our perceptions of what a watch should be. The company's newest item, the Kisai Denshoku, looks more like some kind of sound meter, with orange neon bars on an aluminium faceplate. Denshoku is actually one of the easier Tokyoflash watches to read, not that anyone who actually buys these things would use them to tell time in the first place.
Now that more or less everyone uses mobile phones to tell the time, watches have been relegated to mere decorative pieces. At least that's what it seems like with Tokyoflash's watches, which look great but are nigh-impossible to read. It's latest watch, Fire, is a beautiful streamlined little thing that wraps around your wrist and flashes multi-coloured LED lights to tell the time. Each hole indicates one unit of time—yellow LEDs are the hours, red LEDs show every ten minutes and green LEDs show single minutes--not that you'd ever take the effort needed to figure that out. The cost for this man jewelry? $US130. [TokyoFlash]
My kind of aesthetic: these half-LCD, half brushed metal watches that get the tech-futurism across without bashing you over the head with binary-encoded time, 60 LEDs, etc. They're available in four colours on Etsy, the eBay for homemade goods, directly from the designer in a run of 500 for $US185 each, which isn't bad at all. [Void Watches, Etsy via Technabob and BBG]
Just when we'd sort of gotten over Tokyoflash's watch design, they announce the Rogue, a wristpiece that refreshes their LED-driven sci-fi style while staying true to their confounding time-telling design. The death-green flavour LCD is standard on the Rogue, but the watch comes in silver and gunmetal (otherwise known as the two official best man colours evar). However, even with Tokyoflash's helpful cheat sheet, just how one actually tells time with this watch left us scratching our heads:
Just a few weeks ago I showed you the Infection watch, which was very much in the vein of befuddling time display that importer Tokyo Flash has become famous for. But now there're the new Scramble and Progression watches from Nekura, and it looks like their LED-backlit LCD displays are slightly more straightforward, if still funky. You can even chose the illumination colour from a choice of six, or go for multicolor changing. Those straps are in engraved stainless steel too, and are "self-adjusting" somehow. Available now for about US$124. [Geek Alerts]
TokyoFlash—always guaranteed to surprise us with impossible-to read watch designs— has just stumped up it's newest offering, which this time looks like some kind of organic cell pattern. It's dubbed "Infection"... and you can just imagine the advertising tag can't you? Yep: "No one is immune to infection." The time is revealed by 12 red, 11 yellow and four green LEDs, and you can choose to animate the display or just show the right time. The curved stainless-steel and leather watch is water-resistant to 3ATM and is available now for around US$135. [TokyoFlash via Geekalerts]
Citizen has taken the futristic route with the ITX21-5014 watch from their Independent line. Behind the machine-like watch hands is a green LCD, turned 90 degrees to the left, that displays the digital date, time, alarms, chronographs and timers. The watch is finished off by a checkered band and engraving along the sidewalls of the watch. While not quite the controlled chaos that best describes the average Tokyoflash watch, it's pretty cool and out there for Citizen, who typically make more boring timepieces. The ITX21-5014 is currently selling for ¥22,900 in Japan. [Tokyoflash via Geek Alerts]
DIY gadgeteer Nate True has come up with a home-brew LED watch alternative to those Tokyoflash wristwatches that are all the rage. A mashup of a binary clock and one of those nifty persistence-of-vision displays, Nate's device even packs in a super-bright flashlight mode. You can follow his instructions to make your own, or if your soldering is as bad as mine you can buy a pre-built one for US$189, and one lacking the enclosure for US$89. [cre.ations.net via BoingBoing]
