Casio AQS800W Analog Digital Solar Watch

I was lucky enough to receive a Casio AQ-S800W which has remarkable accuracy, gaining only about 5 seconds each month (spec is +/-30 sec/month). It also looks great. It is more understated and smaller than the version which has the screws showing. This module is perhaps the best one Casio make for their budget watches. It is accurate, solar-powered and fun to use. Despite what other reviews say, setup is simple as is scrolling each day to use the features. I enjoy how you can check the battery status. You can cycle digital time, day or date. In darkness the digital display goes to sleep but wakes up as soon as there is light or you need it. The way the hands are synchronized to the digital display is neat. There is even a feature to re-align them. This is an amazing watch. Light, comfortable and a lot of fun to play with. For the black and orange model sold here, only the hands are luminous. For the black and white version, the numbers are luminous too. Oh, it also has the world time feature and two countdown timers! It lacks the world map of course but it can do pretty much everything the Casio Royale can including the quick dual-button time zone swap.

I have had a lot of cheap watches like this over the years. I have much nicer and more expensive dress watches I wear for work. But for watches like this – which get worn mainly on the weekends, for travel and when working in the garden and so forth – I am a reasonably active guy and can be hard on them. I’ve found that the Casio watches generally hold up better than some of the others I’ve had, so I decided to get another one when the old one I had finally started acting wonky.

Here’s what I like:

The orange/black contrast makes the analog portion of the watch very easy to read. Unlike a lot of cheap digital watches, this one is very nicely sized. It is neither too big and bulky, nor too small. It is relatively thin for a digital watch, more like the thickness of a higher-end dress watch. A lot of cheap watches like this are really ugly. This is not one of them. It is actually good enough looking that I can wear it to work or take it as my only watch when traveling. I wouldn’t call it a dress watch, but it gets by in a way a lot of digital watches can’t.

There is no traditional stem to set the analog face, you do everything with the buttons. The stem on a watch is fragile part – I have had them break – so a design that doesn’t have one means there is one less thing that can break. It has a solar charging system – meaning it draws energy from the sun and so it should never need a new battery during its expected lifetime (10-12 years). It is light weight and reasonably comfortable to wear, despite the plastic band. I like that there are air holes on each side to help keep the band from getting hot and sweaty in warm days. It is waterproof and has a way to quickly flip back and forth for daylight savings time (it has to be done manually, but is just a setting – you don’t have to actually reset the time).

Here is what I don’t like:

Like other reviewers – I REALLY don’t like the fact that the day/date don’t appear together in the LCD. You have to push a button to see the day of the week. The button you use cycles through local time, date, day. The seconds appear constantly this whole time, because, of course, I need to know the seconds at all times. You can tell the design engineers made that decision, not normal people. Then there is this thing to the right of the window like a progress bar that serves absolutely no useful purpose, other than to tell you the watch is still running. I assumed it would show the battery level of the solar battery when I bought it. But it doesn’t – it just counts off 5 seconds over and over and over. I leave the little display on date, because I usually know the day of the week at least. But this is such an obvious design failure – it frankly surprises me that Casio would allow the watch into production without a day/date mode for the LCD.

The hands have those glow in the dark things on them, but the light doesn’t light up the analog portion of the watch. In a dark theater you have to hit the light, then cycle through that same day, date, & time button to get the time. The light is the older kind like you remember from years ago, not the kind that lights up the whole display itself. That is probably a trade-off due to the solar battery.

You will need to keep the manual. Fiddling with the world time and getting it to swap the world time for the local time is not exactly intuitive. Setting the watch is not hard for somebody with basic technical skills, but the display is very small. You pay for the fact the watch looks good with a digital display that is pretty tiny.

Overall – I’m satisfied. This is the nicest looking cheap watch I’ve ever owned. There are some trade-offs with looking good, but I can live with those. Assuming it holds up – it is a very good value. The only thing about this watch that really annoys me is the unforced error of not showing day/date together.

Got this as a replacement for the same watch I got in 2014.

Love this watch

La verdad me gusta mucho este reloj muy minimalista, funciona con luz solar, lo único complicado fue poner la hora pero está muy bueno