With the U.S. Open, the final Grand Slam event on tennis’s 2015 calendar, underway in New York, we showcase a limited-edition Seiko Astron GPS watch created for “brand ambassador” (and top-seeded men’s player) Novak Djokovic.
The Seiko Astron GPS Solar Dual-Time Novak Djokovic is the latest evolution of Seiko’s popular Astron collection, which debuted in 2012 (you can read an in-depth review of the original Seiko Astron here). The Astron is a solar-powered watch that receives GPS satellite signals, enabling the wearer to adjust to any local time zone on Earth — at this point, a total of 40 of them — at the push of a button. The new Astron Dual-Time models boast all of that functionality along with the added convenience of allowing the wearer to also check the time in his home zone — an obvious boon for globetrotters such as Djokovic, who played 20 tournaments in 20 cities in 12 countries in the last 12 months. (Seiko cheekily points out that, were the Serbian tennis star wearing a more traditional watch, he would have had to manually adjust it more than 60 times during that period.)
Powered by an all-new movement, Seiko’s Caliber 8X53, the watch’s appealing chocolate-brown dial displays the second time zone on a two-handed, 12-hour subdial at 6 o’clock, the date in a window at 4 o’clock, and the day of the week via a scale with retrograde hand at 2 o’clock. A tiny AM/PM indicator for the second time zone is adjacent to the upper right of the 6 o’clock subdial, and Seiko says that the date requires no manual correction until February 28, 2100, and the watch will show the time “with a precision of one second every 100,000 years.”
The 44.6-mm case is made of stainless steel, with a rose-gold coating, and features a ceramic bezel bearing the abbreviations of world cities for the GMT indication. Water-resistant to 100 meters and magnetism-resistant to 4,800 A/m, it has a sapphire crystal in front and a solid caseback inscribed with a Novak Djokovic signature, marking the timepiece as one of the limited run of 3,000 pieces worldwide. The strap is brown crocodile leather, with a three-fold, push-button-release clasp. The Seiko Astron GPS Solar Dual-Time Novak Djokovic Limited Edition will carry a retail price of $1,850.
