Within the last year I went G-Shock nuts to G-Shock none and back again with the recent purchase of a modified GW9400 from eBay. The reason I bought a mod? I wanted the olive drab green, I love it, the military colors look great on these watches but I HATE the negative display. It's not calling me fat or telling me I'm stupid, I just HATE the black background with white numbers. It takes that extra .4 seconds to read the display if you're not in great light where the standard display seems so easy for me in almost all lighting conditions.
So the guy got the modules swapped and I'm reaping the rewards.
After a week of wearing it I really found out how bad I hated the G-Shock metal strap keeper. I bent it off and tossed it in the tin and replaced it with a Kijiji find of a GW7900's black resin keeper and it works great and I don't even feel it.
I do wear my watches 24/7 so comfort is king. I found even the case back had good leverage to keep it from sticking or getting annoying against my skin.
I got the version without the carbon fiber reinforced band and I find it's more comfortable than a standard G-Shock. I don't know if it's the bumps to keep the keeper in place that lifts it away from my skin just enough or what, but it's as if it isn't there half the time! I will say this, if I left the metal keeper on I'd go crazy, it pinched my arm hair a lot and it drove me crazy. Comfort rating with standard metal keeper is 3 but if you swap out to a resin one I give it a 5.
The next part of the watch I want to touch on is the functionality. It's pretty loaded. ABC (or ACB for some reason they put them in this order) which is solely based on air pressure for the two (Alti/Baro) which gets really off as time goes by, so don't bother with it too much or it'll drive you mad. I can set it three times in a day just sitting at home. The compass on the other hand works great and has stayed calibrated for the last month hassle free. We also have a 1000 hour stopwatch... Why? Because fuck it, that's why. The package also has what seems to be the standard above low range specs of G-Shock nowadays: 4 alarms and snooze alarm, world time, blah blah blah.
You can commit logs to memory as well so you can, uh, like remember when you were like, uh, you know, 7844 feet above sea level at some, uh, place? Of course if the Alti has changed based of air pressure before you left, it's probably off by a bit or a bunch, uh, whatever.
This watch is atomic and solar and seems to sync better than my last atomic G-Shocks the GXW56-1B and GW7900. Maybe it's because the Rangeman doesn't have as thick a shock absorber as the King? Who knows why the GW7900 wasn't as good... I find it'll even sync when I'm up late playing video games on the main floor, this Rangeman never ceases to amaze.
One feature I don't want to forget is the shortcut button to the stopwatch. Neat, innovative but not innovative enough. Make it a bindable hotkey! That's next level shit right there!
As you will notice as well and I figure I'd put this under functionality is the screen display. I bought this modded with a module swap so the readability is 100% being positive. The negative would drop this score drastically. The functionality gets an obvious 5. If it were negative it'd be a 3 for sure.
Build quality. Yeah, it's a G-Shock. No problem here. The watch feels sturdy, no creaky bits or anything of the sorts. It's a tank on your wrist. If anything, but I haven't had too many accidents, I'd say start putting sapphire crystal display glass. I only ever scratched on watch screen and luckily it was off to the side. Took a good chomp from my boxer to do it too. So I got some cheap China screen protectors just for the hell of it. Still this build, like any other G I review will be getting a well deserved 5.
Coming up last but certainly not least is style. It looks good, not great though. There's always minor things I'd change on every G-Shock I own and this one I would rather the button labels be black as well as since the light button is black, why not black out the sensor and other buttons and decorative screws? Either way that's a very minor issue that I'd have to really think over to pick anything I'd change with this watch (other than the ABC order of ACB) because I can easily live with this watch the way it is. I'm giving the style to be fair a 4. It's always subjective as are all my scores.
So in the grand scheme of things this version, with my strap keeper swap and positive display gets a big 19 out of 20. If this was negative and metal keeper we'd be dropped down to at least 16. So go buy one!
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