After a week of fun in the snow (wearing my Linde Werdelin 3-Timer), it is time to get back to work and back to blogging about watches. During my vacation, the invitations for BaselWorld and press releases are flooding my mailbox. So beware of some frequent updates here at Fratellowatches. Furthermore, an Orient review is coming up. Although I never took a serious look at Orient watches before, it seems to be a lot of bang for the buck. More this week!

As you can see above, I shot some pictures of my Linde Werdelin timepiece during the holiday. Although I am not particularly careful with this watch, it seems to be hard to get any scratches on this baby. Just recently, a reader of my blog asked me about the Linde Werdelin and if it was a scratch magnet…  Well, it is not. After owning it for several months now, the scratches on my Audemars Piguet Royal Oak and IWC Ingenieur are far more present (and visible). I don’t think there is even one scratch on the LW. Nice eh?

Back to answering a lot of unread e-mail on my Mac.

Dear readers,

In these last few hours in 2009, I would like to thank you all for the tremendous number of visits you paid my blog in 2009. An absolute record since I started blogging on FratelloWatches in 2004. Besides FratelloWatches (which I use to reflect my personal view on horological stuff), I have been writing for a number of other watch media, like WorldTempus, WatchUseek Blog, WATCH magazine and MotoringExposure.

I also would like to thank my advertizers for their support and cooperation in 2009! Some of them have been my partners for years now!

Personally, 2009 was a great year with a lot of travelling (including BaselWorld 2009), my wedding, a honeymoon trip and some great watches like the Linde Werdelin 3-Timer with brown dial and my recently acquired Audemars Piguet Royal Oak ‘Jumbo’ 15202. I made some great new watch friends in 2009 (you know who you are!) and hope to continue to do so in 2010.

I wish all of you the best in 2010, and wear your watches in good health!

All the best,

Robert-Jan Broer

Apple’s iPhone is hot, luxury wrist watches are hot. So why not combine these two? More and more watch manufacturers are creating iPhone applications for watch freaks that are eager to learn about their favorite brand (like Jaeger-LeCoultre did) or just to showcase their line-up of watches.

World Watch Report (IC-Agency) decided to analyse the market of iPhone applications for luxury brands and asked a number of luxury watches bloggers, journalists and professionals from the luxury watch industry about their opinions and input. Being both an iPhone fan and luxury watch blogger for quite some time now, and an IT professional, I thought it might be a good idea to participate with World Watch Report.

A number of questions were asked by IC-Agency and I took some time to answer them properly. All answers need some timely processing, so my guess is that short answers will work best.

- What should brands take into account before launching an application?

Simplicity and useability. The Jaeger-LeCoultre iPhone application is a great example of a useable application with its catalogue and watch school. The Breitling iPhone application is not. It doesn’t let you play around with the application, explore different models etc. It is too static. Perhaps even more important, what’s the goal of the iPhone application? What do you want to tell the downloaders of such an application? Buy a watch? Explore our brand? Give them a sense of ‘join the club/you are part of our club’?

So, simplicity/useability, clear goal & target audience.

- According to you, what are the best practices in that field? What can brands concretely expect from it?

Like any other development best practice for software or websites: useability is KEY. There are numerous best / leading practices for software development that focus on useability. One of the main things that works best is to appoint a pilot team that is representative for their target audience. This pilot team should be part of the prototyping lifecycle of the application. This will not only phase out bugs/errors, but will also give the designers great feedback on useability, functionality and performance.

In the end, a luxury brand will be able to release/introduce a proper working application that is tried & tested by a representative team for their luxury products.

- What is your futurology? Which evolutions do you see in the near future?

Platform independent applications that will enable users to have the latest information on the brand, connect to other enthusiasts of the brand (social networking) through the application and have brand videos pushed to the iPhone (or whatever hardware platform used) on demand.

You can view IC-Agency’s presentation on iPhone Applications and the Luxury Brands below:

I am very curious about your take on this. Use the comments to share your thoughts with us.

Last week, No.30 of WATCH magazine came out, including my column on vintage Rolex watches. WATCH is a Dutch lifestyle magazine, covering topics on travelling, photography, cars, HiFi, fashion and watches. WATCH also releases a watch annual, like the Armband Uhren Katalog, covering most watch brands and their collections. One of the other authors on watch topics is watchelebrity Elizabeth Doerr. She writes about haute horlogerie for approximately 20 titles (world wide), including the web portal WorldTempus.

The column I wrote for this edition, is mainly about the popularity of vintage Rolex watches and the things you should pay attention to when buying them. My former two articles for WATCH magazine were about being spoiled (or neglected) by the big watch brands and about the watch industry and e-commerce.

Part of the fun of collecting (vintage) wrist watches is buying accessories like watch boxes, straps, old advertisements, old catalogues, hats, instruction manuals etc. Just to complete your (vintage) watch or just to have fun. You can’t always spend hundreds or thousands of dollars/euros on a watch, so you’ll need to fulfil your horological needs otherwise. Hence, you are collecting all the stuff your girlfriend or wife sees as ‘crap’. I used to get some old National GeoGraphics magazines for example (1960s and 1970s) and cut out all the cool Omega / NASA advertisements (www.old-omegas.com is a very good reference for this)

A few weeks ago, I went to the watchfair in Düsseldorf, Germany. It is a quarterly event held in the Radisson-SAS Hotel and besides watches, there are quite a few merchants who carry booklets, straps, boxes, books and other watch accessories. I noticed that one of the merchants (a Dutch guy) had an Omega box for sale with a few pins. You know, these small things you can attach to your shirt or jacket. Omega created a few of these pins with a blink to the Speedmaster line and its involvement in the Moon landing. To my best knowledge, these pins were meant for people who bought the 1957 (50 years) edition of the Speedmaster Professional watch 2 years ago. I had noticed them last year during my visit to the US, but the jeweler didn’t want to sell them to me. Anyway, I managed to get two boxes a few months ago. I gave one away to my watchmaker (who is a total Speedmaster adept) and kept one for myself. See below for an example of these pins:

Anyhows, this particular merchant at the watchfair didn’t even blink when he showed the pricetag of 350 Euros. What an idiot. Ofcourse, everything has its collector’s value. A set of silver Rolex spoons by Bucherer, vintage catalogues, watch boxes, watch standards etc. But asking 350 euro for a box with a few pins that are still available at Omega (as a giveaway) is like the people on eBay asking a lot of money for actual watch catalogues. What’s wrong with some friendly giving and taking stuff that other people are looking for and didn’t cost you a penny? Or at least ask a reasonable price. If you want to fetch 350 euro for a box of pins that is still obtainable, put it in a safe for 15 years and try again.

About a year back, the owner of Richmenstoys had a nice Audemars Piguet carton outer box for a certain watch at his booth during a watch fair. A friend of mine was looking for such a carton outer box since a while, since the seller of his watch didn’t include the original one (sigh!). After asking what this carton outer box should cost him, the seller smiled and said “a can of soda”.