Hands-On With The Wolbrook Pan4Timer Automatic — Brilliant Or Needlessly Complicated?

When people ask me for the time, I naturally tend to show them my watch rather than tell them. I am not quite sure why I do this. Maybe I feel they won’t believe me unless I let them see for themselves. Maybe I have issues… In any case, this didn’t work at all when I was wearing the Wolbrook Pan4Timer Automatic. This is one of those watches that don’t allow for quick, intuitive time reading. You need to understand it to use it. Why? Well, because it offers a rather novel way of displaying multiple time zones.

That leads to an important question: is that an improvement or simply a contrived attempt to be different? Is it brilliant or overly complicated? Let’s find out!

But first, what is the Wolbrook Pan4Timer Automatic?

Before we get into the Wolbrook Pan4Timer Automatic’s time-zone-crossing abilities, let’s quickly cover the basics. Wolbrook is a French brand, revived in 2019. It produces a suite of vintage-inspired watches in different styles, with a strong focus on (skin) divers and chronographs. Crucially, Wolbrook does so at an aggressive price point. The Pan4Timer we have here, for instance, costs only €449.

Built on Wolbrook’s skin-diver platform, this stainless steel model has a 40mm diameter, a 48mm lug-to-lug, and a 13mm profile. Part of that thickness comes from the box-style sapphire crystal up top. The watch also offers a screw-down crown and water resistance to 150 meters. The lugs have a common 20mm spacing, and you can opt for several strap and bracelet options. My review unit came on a tan leather strap.

Floating within a rubber shock-absorbing mount, we find an automatic Miyota caliber 8315. It ticks at 21,600 vibrations per hour and offers an ample 60-hour power reserve. In Wolbrook’s guise, it serves up a roulette date at 4:30 and should run within ±15 seconds per day.

So, how does it work?

Okay, on to the Wolbrook Pan4Timer Automatic’s distinguishing party piece. You may notice the absence of a traditional hour hand. Instead, you get four consecutive hour indicators printed on a transparent disc. A regular minute hand and seconds hand complete the package. The four hour pointers correspond with four colors on the bezel, coding for different cities around the world.

The idea, then, is that the Wolbrook Pan4Timer Automatic allows for intuitive reading of four consecutive time zones. In other words, if you find yourself in Paris, you set the correct time using the orange hour indicator. Now, you can instantly see that it is one hour earlier in London, one hour later in Helsinki, and two hours later in Moscow. Just to be overly clear: the four indicators are fixed, painted onto a single transparent disc, and can only be rotated as a set, not independently. You use the unidirectional bezel to set the region. In this case, then, you would set the rhombus index on the bezel to 12, indicating that you are looking at the London–Moscow part of the world.

Now, let’s say you remain in Paris but want to know the time in Denver. Now, you turn the Paris section of the bezel to the orange hour hand. The Denver marking on the bezel now hovers over the corresponding hour in Denver. So, let’s assume it is 8:00 in Paris. You rotate the Paris section to 8, and see the Denver marking hover over 00:00. You will have to reason for yourself whether this means 00:00 or 12:00, though.

How would one use the Wolbrook Pan4Timer Automatic?

As you see, the Wolbrook Pan4Timer Automatic is best suited to reading consecutive time zones. If you want to quickly read times around the globe, a traditional worldtimer is more practical.

This leads to the question: who is this for? Maybe for me, actually. I live in the Netherlands (Paris time zone), but I often work with people in the UK. The Pan4Timer would enable me to always see at a glance what time it is for both my English friends and myself.

Alternatively, one could envision this being useful for people traveling around within a region. If you were going on a trip across Asia and Australia, you could track the relevant four consecutive time zones between Bangkok and Brisbane. Theoretically, this would enable you to set your watch only once.

So, is the Wolbrook Pan4Timer Automatic brilliant or needlessly complicated?

Okay, so there are scenarios in which the Wolbrook Pan4Timer Automatic is useful. The real question, however, is whether it is better than a traditional worldtimer, a regular worldtimer bezel, or a GMT complication. To this question, I am inclined to say “no.”

When tracking neighboring time zones, I don’t think you really need a complication. I already know that London is one hour behind Amsterdam, and it doesn’t demand overly challenging mental gymnastics to figure that out. For the travel scenario, you would certainly want a higher resolution on the bezel so you can see whether you have actually crossed a time zone or not.

Maybe I am taking it all way too seriously, though. Perhaps the Wolbrook Pan4Timer Automatic is more about the romance of global perspective than about actual function. From this point of view, it works rather well. The four indicators visually remind us of the relativity of our vantage point. The color coding adds a fun, lighthearted touch. The fact that the hour indicators seem to float adds visual interest, reminiscent of Haute Horlogerie “Myserieuse” designs.

Closing thoughts

Crucially, we have to remember that this watch costs less than a regular service of your average Rolex GMT-Master. In typical Wolbrook fashion, it offers a fun, accessible alternative. It aims to be a colorful outlier within your collection or a conversation starter. I appreciate it as an exercise in seeing things differently. Its ambition was never to introduce a paradigm shift in how we track multiple time zones. Instead, it aimed to offer something a bit out of left field. Both visually and conceptually, it succeeds.

I could put on my pretentious watch reviewer’s hat and tell you how it should have had a bidirectional bezel and how you can see the price reflected in its coarse execution and finishing. But to do that would be to miss the point. In the end, you get a lot of watch for the money, and it has the potential to put a smile on your face, which, sometimes, is all you need.

What do you think of the Wolbrook Pan4Timer Automatic? Let us know in the comments section below!