Description
Nomos has given the Metro Date Power Reserve the one thing owners have asked for since 2014: a quick-set date. The new Metro Date Power Reserve Ice Blue arrives on a brand-new in-house hand-wound calibre, the DUW 4701, and with it a cool, metallic ice-blue dial that reads almost white in some light and distinctly glacial in others. At USD 4,500 it sits exactly where Nomos has always been strongest — a genuinely manufacture-made German watch at a price most Swiss houses reserve for an ETA.
The Metro matters inside Nomos for a reason beyond its Mark Braun styling. The original 2014 Metro Date Power Reserve, reference 1101, was the first watch to carry the Nomos Swing System, the brand's own escapement and regulating assembly developed with the Fraunhofer Institute and TU Dresden. Twelve years later, Nomos is again using the Metro as the launch pad for new movement engineering.
The ice-blue dial is offered on two watches: this hand-wound Date Power Reserve and the automatic Metro neomatik 41 Update with the brand's patented ring date. Both are permanent-collection pieces, available now.
Design
The case is unchanged and all the better for it: 37 mm across and just 8 mm tall in polished stainless steel, with the Metro's thin bezel and slender wire lugs. A domed sapphire crystal sits over the dial; a porthole-style sapphire caseback — engraved DUW 4701, 23 Rubine and Metro — shows the movement.
The dial keeps Braun's deliberately off-balance layout. The power-reserve indicator floats between 12 and 1 o'clock, the Nomos signature sits out at 9, and the recessed, snailed small-seconds register stacks above the date aperture at 6. The galvanised ice-blue surface carries grey Arabic numerals on a peripheral minute track with white dots between them, teal dot hour markers, and a light-blue seconds hand. The power-reserve wheel is tri-colour — teal for full, light blue for neutral, white for low. Hour and minute hands are rhodium-plated and tapered to a needle. It comes on a black Horween Genuine Shell Cordovan strap.
Specifications
- Reference: 1121 (ice blue dial); the same calibre upgrade is also offered with a silver-white dial
- Case diameter: 37 mm
- Case thickness: 8 mm
- Case material: polished stainless steel, wire lugs
- Crystal: domed sapphire; sapphire display caseback
- Water resistance: 5 atm (50 m)
- Dial: galvanised ice-blue metallic; grey Arabic numerals, teal hour dots, tri-colour power-reserve wheel
- Movement: Nomos DUW 4701, in-house, manual-winding (based on the DUW 4601)
- Movement dimensions: 32.1 mm x 2.8 mm, 23 jewels
- Escapement: Nomos Swing System (in-house escapement and regulating assembly)
- Frequency: 21,600 vph (3 Hz)
- Power reserve: 52 hours
- Functions: hours, minutes, small seconds (hacking), quick-set date, power-reserve indicator
- Strap: black Horween Genuine Shell Cordovan
- Limited edition: no — permanent collection
- Price: USD 4,500
- Availability: now, at Nomos retailers
- Companion model: Metro neomatik 41 Update Ice Blue, ref. 1166 — 40.5 mm x 9.1 mm steel, automatic DUW 6101, patented ring date, 50-hour power reserve, USD 5,390
What's Exciting
The headline is not the colour, it is the calibre. The outgoing DUW 4401 made you wind the crown forward through twenty-odd days to correct a date — a genuine irritation on a watch you do not wear every day. The DUW 4701 adds a patented quick-set and pushes the power reserve from 42 to 52 hours while keeping exactly the same 32.1 mm x 2.8 mm footprint, which is why the case dimensions did not move a tenth of a millimetre. That is disciplined engineering, not a facelift.
And the value story remains almost unanswerable. USD 4,500 buys a German manufacture movement with the brand's own escapement and hairspring, finished with sunray-striped ribbing on the three-quarter plate, perlage, gold-filled engraving, blued screws and a skeletonised balance cock — in a 8 mm-thick case. Very little else at this price is made to this depth in-house.
History
Mark Braun designed the Metro in 2014, drawing on metro-map signage and the graphic language of transit systems to push Nomos's Bauhaus vocabulary somewhere more urban and more colourful. The first Metro Date Power Reserve, ref. 1101, mattered technically as well as visually: it introduced the Nomos Swing System, the in-house escapement that took roughly seven years to develop and moved Nomos from a movement finisher to one of the very small group of makers producing escapements in series.
Since then the Metro has been through colour editions, rose-gold variants, market specials and, in 2021, the larger Metro neomatik 41 Update with the ring date first seen on the Tangente in 2018. The ice-blue pair continues that pattern — the Metro as the place Nomos tries its next idea first.
Sources
- Monochrome Watches — New Ice Blue Dials for the Nomos Metro Date Power Reserve and Neomatik 41 Update, Plus a Movement Upgrade
- Hodinkee — Introducing: The Nomos Glashutte Metro Date Power Reserve Gets A New Caliber (Live Pics)
- Worn & Wound — The Nomos Metro Gets an Ice Blue Color Scheme and a Brand-New Mechanical Caliber
