The latest in the lineup of the almost-indestructible G-shock range is the ruggedly handsome GA-2100, dubbed as the 'CasiOak' by watch aficionados due to its resemblance to the Audemars Piguet Royal Oak. And unlike the AP Royal Oak, you can launch this at the wall with tremendous power and the watch would be fine (anyone who'd like to challenge this with their own AP, let me know how that goes). For those of you who're unaware of Casio G-Shocks, you can smash them, shout at them, stamp on them, boil them, run over them, hurl them, sink them to the depths of the ocean, disparage them, fry them, and then tell the time on them afterward - they're aggressively robust timepieces.
Launching in a few colours (red, blue probably, can't remember), this particular GA-2100 is the black-on-black on slate-black version. It's as if the Air Force needed watches for their stealth pilots' to also be unseen, unheard, and unreadable by enemy detection. And when I mean unreadable, boy do I mean it. Unless you're inside the sun itself, you'll have a hard time glancing at the time without studying it like a wizard deciphering an old tome.
Brightness bumped to 10,000%
The GA-2100 comes with Casio's Carbon Core Guard. I'm not even going to read up on what that's supposed to do, but if it makes a G-Shock even more sturdy, soon they'll be slapping these guys together to make armour.
There's a small inverted digital screen tucked into the bottom right corner of the face along with a day-indicator complication at the 9 o'clock mark. Next to the futuristic digital screen is a small LED bulb (hidden within the inner bezel) that lights up the screen but barely anything else. The watch is so stealthy, that even it doesn't want you to see it.
"Hey, what's the time?", someone hurriedly asks from across the street. "I don't know", I respond, looking right at my watch.
Another point that concerns me is that other G-Shock models have good travel from the protective resin bezel to the glass, whereas the GA-2100's bezel-to-glass depth seems to be about 1mm. I know I went on and on about how these watches are made to be used and that they're invincible, but I don't want my watch to suffer from smashed glass because I dropped it on an uneven floor.
I've been wearing this watch in a variety of scenarios plucked from my active and exhaustingly athletic lifestyle (washing up, at the cinema, in the shower, walking to the shops, rumbling about on a bus, sitting down at a laptop) and I often bring the watch up to my face like the pause menu in James Bond Goldeneye for the Nintendo 64 to scrape the time away from the light-absorbing face, but I wouldn't change it at all.
