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$350-$500 puts you into the range of cheap trash and knock-off timepieces.

Well, the watch I'm wearing right now is a Seiko automatic that cost well below that price range; yet it has a fully in-house movement (right down to Seiko's own oil formulations) and it's accurate to within half a second a day (technically it loses 8 secs every 30 days on average, after regulating it myself). As you may be aware, Seiko's movements are so good that Tag Heuer famously used one of them as the basis of their own "100% in house" movement several years ago :)

Getting back to topic, though, I agree that real watchmakers aren't in any danger from smartwatches. Mechanical watches are highly fashionable elite items that are valued because they are rare, handmade works of art. It's like suggesting that oil paintings will be threatened by digital photo frames -- the markets for the two products are pretty much non-overlapping.

I think this is basically the same thing that has been used on good watches for a long time:

http://www.europastar.com/europastar/watch_tech/watchcrystals.jsp

Cabestan

Ulysse Nardin Freak

Parmigiani Fleurier Bugatti Type 370

Jaeger-LeCoultre Gyrotourbillon

Urwerk Control Board

I don't know how high the power requirements are, but what about something like the Kinetic Power for watches? Basically, they have self-winding main springs that are wound by the motion of the wearers wrist (spare us the obvious jokes). I don't have a link, but I know some of them can retain power for weeks, even after being removed from the wearer's wrist. They even had one that would go into lower pwoer mode if removed for a while, and would track the time for years. One flick of the wrist a year later and it would instantly snap to the right time.

Now, put one of these on an eNewspaper, and just carrying the thing in your briefcase might be enough to keep it charged.

Bah. My watch will never need a battery change.

Hence, my trusty kinetic watch is effectively equivalent but a lot more affordable.

2. Why aren't watches ever labeled or described in advertising as "waterproof" even if they can be worn deep-sea diving?
According to guidelines issued by the Federal Trade Commission, watch marketers are not allowed to label their watches "water-proof." Even watches designed for deep-sea diving cannot claim to be water-proof.

LOL that's not the first watch ever! Mechanical watches were around centuries earlier.

Ever heard of self-winding watches? Then learn How does a Self-Winding Watch Work?

Find a good short FAQ about automatic watches Here

The first hand watch was invented in the 1741. Then self-winding watches came about when Rolex invented the mechanism in 1931. On howstuffworks.com there might be an image of a transparent backside of an "automatic" or self-winding watch showing the mechanism. It's basically a half of a disk at the bottom of the watch that slides back and forth whenever the wearer does anything to move the watch (walk, write, etc.) This keeps them recharged for as much as 48 hours when you stop wearing them!

Apparently self-winding watches are coming back into style because they're so sweet and lose their accuracy at a rate of only a couple of seconds each month.

Sorry to bore you, but I did this research a few weeks earlier because I was interested in getting a watch of this type. :)
(No Signature file found.)

The watch I've always thought was cool and wanted is called the "See Touch Watch". They have a website but it doesn't seem to work. If you search google, you can find this page with a picture of it at the bottom. The idea is that the watch looks like a dominoe, and the bumps move up or down to tell the time. It is really quite cool. I first found out about it on "Next Step" on the discovery channel. That was a cool show, so was Beyond 2000 for that matter. Anyway, I've always thought it's a cool watch but they have never answered my e-mails, and I don't have the $$$ to call Europe. The only time I found a price for it, I think it was a few hundred, but I don't remember. Such a cool watch.

Here's the link that worked for me (same, but without the inner space):

http://www.europastar.com/ESWatch/index.html?watch tech/watchcrystals.html

Just buy a space shuttle. They all come with them included.

You can actually buy sapphire windows at least up to 15cm square some places I found on the net.. supermarket scanners also sometimes have sapphire windows apparently.

The watchglass of my Rolex is a sapphire crystal. Looks cool, doesn't scratch. This page has info about synthetic sapphire watchglasses. It says Seiko coats mineral glass with synthetic sapphire (sapphlex they call it) to make it hard.

7. Who invented the automatic watch? The modern rotor system was developed and patented by Rolex and introduced into the Oyster line as the Oyster Perpetual in 1931. Emile Borer, Rolex's technical chief at the time, is credited with inventing the modern rotor system.
The person who first developed a rotor, however, was Abraham-Louis Perrelet (1729-1826), one of Switzerland's greatest watchmakers. Perrelet is considered the father of the automatic watch. He introduced the concept in 1770 and was way ahead of his time since the invention was better suited to wristwatches. Perrelet lived in the pocket watch era and, because the watches did not move much in pockets, the rotor system did not perform so well. The rotor did not move around enough to wind the mainspring sufficiently.
Abraham-Louis Breguet (1747-1823) improved self-winding watches; he called them "perpetuelles" (the likely source of Rolex's term). Other watchmaking greats of the 19th century advanced the concept. But it wasn't until wristwatches became popular after World War I and Rolex perfected its system that automatics came into their own.