Given that it debuted as a plastic-cased digital watch famous for its ability to take a beating, you might think that a premium Casio G-Shock in glimmering rose gold color might be off-brand — a hard sell.
And yet, the metal rendering has proven a winning formula for the brand's square-shaped icon from 1983. If you've been waiting for the perfect version, the combination of features and shiny metal case mean that this just might be it...provided you like a little flash.
Building on the watch's cultural presence and recognizable design, recent models have been rendered both in steel or with steel bezels over a resin base. With its steel case and bracelet, this is the first of the Full Metal series to offer a rose gold finish — meaning that the color is applied to underlying metal via a process called ion plating.
What makes the new GMWB5000GD-4 cool, however, is that it offers not only a fun, blingy look, but the ideal G-Shock experience. In addition to being tough, it has two key features: Tough Solar, which charges the battery via light, and a positive display, which offers dark text on a light background. (A negative display — light-on-dark — characterizes all but one other current model in the Full Metal series, making most of them significantly harder to read in many situations.)
Along with the nicely rendered, elevated feel of the metal case and bracelet (note the contrasting brushed and polished finishes), these features makes the latest Full Metal G-Shock a winner — as long as you can pull off a rose gold digital watch. Of course, it's got the usual bevy of Casio technology, as well as other premium features like Bluetooth for connecting to a handy smartphone app.
As for price? It costs more than the basic resin-cased models, but significantly less than the actual 18k gold version priced for collectors at $70,000; the GMWB5000GD-4 is available for a reasonable MSRP of $600.
