alt Hacker NewsOne thing I've never understood (and hopefully some Casio geek can shine a light on): why do almost all old Casio models have a 24/12h time switch taking the premium spot as one of the main 4 buttons, instead of having it buried deep in the (awkward) menus. Seems to me that something like alarm or stopwatch setting or a second menu action button would have been far more useful.
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I spoke with a Casio engineer about this. It's so that your bending wrist can accidentally switch it to 12h time when you actually really want it on 24h time or vice versa.
A watch like the F-91W is a bit wonky in terms of the buttons. You're right the 24/12h makes no sense, who needs to switch between those two options regularly? The backlight button is also questionable, because it's not entirely clear what you're suppose to gain by vaguely illuminating the first 20% of display, which will be empty from midnight until 20:00.
In my country, 30-40 years back, people who needed a watch were those ones who travel regularly. And travel was mostly using public transport, trains and planes. Most or all of it operated using a 24h time. That button was very useful. Compare that to the mute/silence/DND physical button in iPhones today.
Also people who worked in confined spaces who wouldn’t know if it was day or night outside after a days job. My father who worked in an oil rig in Abu Dhabi used one. He gifted me one.
This was 1998.
Those buttons are the menu. The idea of menus on watches is a modern ux extravagance.
I don’t have the satisfying answer as to why they dedicated a button to 12/24 hour time but my guess is that it’s simply a cool digital feature and stands out against the limitations of analog watches.
For a very long time, China and India used a mixture of the 12-hour and 24-hour formats, which meant they had to convert the time or switch between time formats multiple times par day. That was the intended use of this button.
Both countries have now officially switched to the 24-hour format.
Wearing a Casio as I type this. The "24hr" button switches 12/24 modes on the "watch" mode, when using stopwatch it starts the watch, and when using alarms it turns the alarm on/off.
It has pretty critical functionality for those, I think the way its labeled on the watch face just makes it sound a little odd.
Even worse, my Casio can't even change the default mm-dd to my country's default dd-mm, keeps throwing me off.
I used to walk around with a Casio always, I would have welcomed this connectivity, but now I have a Pebble and I like the balance. Could have done without the HR monitor, and with GPS though (some features don't work without phone connection, too many I find). Other than that, perfect for me.
My F-91F I replaced the Casio module with an Ollee watch and pretty much disabled all of the features, I can sync the time when reconnecting to Bluetooth on my phone which I do about once a month.
For me the 24h is buried... But then I can't change the default mm-dd to my country's default dd-mm, which just keeps throwing me off.
Maybe it's because the United States is not the whole planet
Newish Casio user here. From what I understand, it's so that you can switch it to 24h after accidentally switching it to 12h and vice versa.