With the Masters in full flow, it seems appropriate to take a look at the Etiqus Sport Pro, which has the great game written all over its face. That face is a 3D dimpled recreation of a golf ball, the second hand is the greens flag and the hour markings are represented by tee batons.
Most modern sports watches have bezels that relate to the particular sport favoured by the wearer. Thus divers have the Rolex Submariner, yachties the Omega Seamaster and flyers the Breitling Aviator.
The Etiqus boasts the Butler Bezel, which allows its golfing owners to pace themselves over 18 holes. It's really quite simple – you rotate the bezel so the start marker coincides with your tee-off time and the number sequence on the bezel tells you approximately in what time you should have played each hole, allowing you to track yourself and complete the course in under four hours, as per the Royal & Ancient guidelines. It also has a 100-metre water resistance rating for golfers who find themselves fishing their balls out of water hazards.
These themed design flourishes aside, the Etiqus is a modern, Swiss-made quartz watch that is reasonably priced (£269) and not unattractive on the wrist. By modern I mean it is a great lump of a watch, a weighty piece of arm furniture that is the current fashion.
It keeps perfect time – at least it did for the time I tested it – and according to its designer Gary Butler it will, most importantly, identify you in your local pub or wine bar as a dedicated golfer. He says it creates an emotional attachment between serious golfers, although there is no suggestion that the wearing of said watch will turn you into Rory McIlroy.
At the moment there are four watches in the range, including a less chunky version of the Sport Pro for lady golfers, and the prices range from £179 to £329, making Etiqus watches very good value for money.
A piece of chrono-frippery or essential kit? Probably somewhere in between, which makes the Etiqus perfect material for this column.
Soundmagic E10 or E20S
Walk into any hi-fi, electrical appliance outlet or all-purpose gadget store and you will see row after row of in-ear headphones, most produced by familiar hi-fi companies (Bose, Philips, Sennheiser, B&O etc), some by an innovative generation of rappers (Dr Dre, Ludacris) and many by companies we've never heard of.
But the entry-level earphones that have been receiving unanimous praise over the past year are SoundMAGIC E10s and the more recent ES20s, both of which are a dramatic improvement on the horrible cheap earbuds that come with iPods and other MP3 players, and actually a lot better than many earphones that are twice the price. They have rich, vibrant bass tones and distinct clarity in treble and mid-range.
They retail at between £30 and £35 and deserve all the praise that they have been garnering from within the music industry.
Angelbird SSD2go Pocket
SSD or HDD, that is the question. Well, maybe not the question, but if you're moving around the world and carrying important computer data with you, it is at least a reasonably important question.
Hard Disc Drive uses a mechanical arm with a read/write head to put information on a storage platter whereas a Solid State Drive stores its information on microchips and is ultimately a large memory stick.
Thus SSDs tend to be faster and less prone to damage. The new Angelbird Pocket is an ultraportable USB SSD that is just 3.5in x 2.75in x 0.41in, and is stylish, fast and robust.
It comes in three memory sizes – 128GB, 256GB and 512GB – and is loaded with additional software that can be accessed once the personal support portal has been set up.
That includes both TRIM and SMART for Mac users, the only external SSD to do this. It costs between £164 and £220 depending on the amount of memory.
