While not a participant in the SIHH, Hublot was among several luxury watch brands exhibiting new products outside of the show during the third week of January, when Geneva annually becomes a watch wonderland. One of the brand’s most notable new releases was the Hublot Big Bang Unico GMT, which marks the debut of an all-new, user-friendly second-time-zone function for frequent travelers.
The internal integration movement of the watch has been with a new patent, proprietary module that allows the wearer to immediately change the local time of the simple push button, read the time, day and night display sync, second, arrow-shaped pin set the crown.
Two buttons control the second-time-zone function at 2 o’clock and 4:45 mm; their rectangular shape reminiscent of the early big bang humbo watches, distinguishing them from chronographs directly reflected in other big bang integrated models. 2 o’clock pendulum moves the hour hand in hour increments, and 4 o’clock fader moves it in the same paragraph. The security device’s built-in mechanism prevents simultaneous activation of two scribes. The local time setting is independent of the other hand; minute and second gears are driven, which means it does not need to synchronize all with each changed time zone.
The openworked dial, a hallmark of the Big Bang Unico series, is designed to display both time zones in the same space simultaneously, adding to its legibility. The arrow-shaped hand indicating the home time uses a 12-hour display and is correlated to a day/night disk so that the user can see at a glance whether the time back home is in AM or PM. The graduations for the 12 hours are alternated: engraved on the dial and indexed on the bezel.
The Hublot Big Bang Unico GMT is available with either a titanium (pictured at top) or carbon fiber (above) case, and comes on a structured, ribbed, black and blue natural rubber strap that can be easily swapped out and replaced with Hublot’s recently introduced “One Click” interchangeable strap system. The movement, Caliber HUB 1251, is based on the brand’s original, in-house Unico movement, here with the chronograph functions removed and replaced by the GMT module. Composed of 358 pieces, it features automatic winding, a 28,800-vph (4 Hz) frequency, and a 72-hour power reserve.
Prices are $19,900 for the titanium version and $23,100 for the carbon fiber.