Bathys latest $795 lady’s diving watch comes with a fantastic press release that spends the first two paragraphs skewering the entire culture of women’s gadget design:
Bathys Hawaii has announced the release of the Lunar Wahine, a revolutionary watch in that it is actually easy to determine what time it is when looking at the dial. Said company spokesperson and Bathys CEO, John Patterson PhD “We found in extensive market research that although women felt that diamonds were ‘nice’ – most women said they mainly wore a watch in order to be able to tell the time”. He continues, “Additionally, our research found that there is a fairly large segment of the women out there who really do not care for having a gemstone-set butterfly on the dial of their watch, but would rather have a date feature instead.”
We polled a few women on the streets to get their reaction to the new design from Bathys: “Well I like it because it doesn’t look like a diamond-encrusted spaceship landed on my wrist”, said Lisa Wilson when we showed her the new Wahine. When asked for her opinion, Kathy Anderson of Plano Texas said, “Hey look at that – it’s 2:14”. And when we spoke with Martha Sidlo who purchased one of the watches several days ago she said, “I was really surprised at first. I kept looking down and actually seeing the actual time – all in real time. It was like I was living in ‘the now’ for the first time ever…”
The press release then goes into some detail about their innovative moon phase read-out (for surfers, of course, which makes total sense), but after the tongue-in-cheek tirade that preceded it, I can perhaps be forgiven for thinking Bathys had designed their lady’s diver watch to euphemistically follow its user’s monthly fallopian cycle.
Bathys releases a diver for the ladies [Crunchgear]
Everything is awesome about this but the price.
Diving watch? I got all excited for a moment, because as a female scuba diver, while I use a computer to dive and don’t *need* a watch, I’ve always wanted a good looking, functional, usable diving watch just to have it.
This watch, as pictured and discussed on the site, does not suit the purposes of diving, except for being good for 100m. It lacks a bezel, for one thing, and the moon cycle doesn’t really mean anything to me.
There is definitely a poverty of good, feminine and useful diving watches.
Additionally, I thought that the 100m was a bit short for a diving watch (though as a recreational/rescue diver, I don’t go much farther than 30m.) Diving watches tend to be at least good for 200m.
Wikipedia has some info on dive watches here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diving_watches