Which model of watch offers eleven distinct functions activated by pressure on the crown then by contact on the touch screen, namely a vinometer, a stop watch, a compass, two alarms, a thermometer, a barometer, a posting dates and time, an everlasting calendar programmed until 2099, a countdown and a retro-lighting. Useless to seek well a long time. Any amateur of electronic watches who respects himself knows pertinently that there is only one only clock making House to market such a product: Tissot, whose last T-Touch Expert is precisely this little marvel of technology to be had this single panoply of functions in its kind.

      Developed at Asulab, research and the development laboratory of the Group Swatch, technology with touch screen adapted to the wrist watches represented certainly a major opening in the field of the chronometers with quartz. An opening carried out in 2000 all the more significant as no competitor managed to republish the exploit up to now. And yet, there are about fifteen years, the leading authorities of the first world clock and watch maker were hardly persuaded of the potential of this principle of activation of the functions by touch of the watch glass . They then had eyes only for the projects of development of the show-telephone, the awaited tidal wave of the time. Mow, this one did not take place, whereas T-Touch sold to several hundreds of thousands of specimens per years is traditional kind right now.

      The development of this technology however will have posed considerable problems. For the small history, at the time of the first presentation of the potentialities of the clock making touch screen to the leaders of the Swatch Group, the watch was connected by a wire to a battery of computers hidden behind a curtain. It is to say the efforts to be made, initially to miniaturize embarked data processing, and then to adapt the systems of production intended to industrialize these products to become about it. Within the company, Tissot, taken along by Francois Thumbed, is the first House to have believed in this technology and its commercial potential. It is still it which will finance part of the development of it. Large good took some to him. T-Touch owes its existence with this obstinacy, an existence which is still far from to have delivered all its secrecies.

      As explained it recently Gerald Matthey and Enzo Fullin of ETA Manufacture Clock making Switzerland with the one Day course of study the Swiss Company of chronometry, “seven years ago, Tissot marketed the T-Touch watch with its user interface tactile but also with its multiple temperature, pressure pick-ups and compass. Today, the success of this product is maintained on its higher level and a second more modern and more powerful generation was developed. ” On the basis of the movement ETA E45.301 of 2005, which equips T-Navigator, conceived on modular and evolutionary bases as well on the mechanical level as electronic, the engineers of the company thus could supplement, “with a deployment of minimal effort”, two new movements, E48.351 and E48.301 respectively equipping T-Touch Expert and Sea- Touch which will be marketed in 2009.

      Nail of these developments: “one 5th elements created in the shape of a small completely detached electronic module of the movement, concentrate of no clock making specific functions, as the two specialists in ETA explain it. And to avoid any useless complication, contours of the printed circuit of this module, baptized “module sensor” take again those of the turntable accurately existing.

Tissot Sea Touch – Ocean Depths Pictures

Tags: electronic watches