The most consequential NOMOS release of the autumn is a watch that looks, at first glance, like a colour change. Announced on October 8, the Metro date power reserve ice blue (ref. 1121) pairs a galvanized, light-blue metallic dial with an entirely new hand-wound calibre, the DUW 4701, bringing a quick-set date and a longer power reserve to a design that has been in the catalogue since 2014. Alongside it, the Metro neomatik 41 Update (ref. 1166) takes the same ice-blue dial in a larger automatic case. Both watches are available now.
Some context explains why a movement swap matters here. The Metro, designed by the Berlin product designer Mark Braun, arrived in 2014 as the first NOMOS watch with the brand’s own swing system escapement: the component that regulates the watch, made in Glashütte rather than bought in. For a manufacture of NOMOS’s size, that escapement was a declaration of independence, and the Metro was its standard-bearer. The original calibre, the DUW 4401, offered 42 hours of power reserve, and its date could not be quick-set: owners advanced it by winding the hands past midnight, a small daily friction that owners have noted for a decade.
The DUW 4701 removes that friction. Built on the architecture of the DUW 4601 that debuted in the Tangente 2date, the new calibre keeps the outgoing movement’s footprint, 32.1 mm across and just 2.8 mm thick, so the case around it does not change. Inside that footprint, NOMOS fits a patented quick-set date and stretches the power reserve from 42 to 52 hours. The power-reserve indicator is driven directly on the barrel. Through the sapphire back, the movement shows a redesigned three-quarter plate with sunray ribbing radiating from the regulating organ, a skeletonized balance cock that leaves the swing system and its blue hairspring visible, perlage, gold engravings and temperature-blued screws.
The watch itself keeps the Metro’s graphic discipline. The polished steel case measures 37.0 mm in diameter and 8.0 mm thick, with a 43.6 mm lug-to-lug span, wire lugs, a domed sapphire crystal and water resistance of 5 ATM. The ice-blue dial is galvanized with a metallic finish that NOMOS describes as shifting between cool blue and near white with the light, in the manner of sky reflected in a glass facade. Hour markers are dots in blue and teal, minutes are a dotted track with grey Arabic numerals at five-minute intervals, and the hands are slender, rhodium-plated and tapered, with a light-blue seconds hand in the snailed subdial at 6 o’clock and the date window beneath it. The power-reserve aperture sits near 1 o’clock, its disc turning through white, light blue and teal as the reserve runs down. The strap is black Horween Genuine Shell Cordovan on quick-change spring bars.
The automatic sibling works at a different scale. The Metro neomatik 41 Update ice blue measures 40.5 mm across and 9.1 mm thick, and runs the in-house DUW 6101: an automatic calibre 3.6 mm thick with up to 50 hours of reserve, whose patented ring date runs around the edge of the dial, the current date framed by two teal markers and adjustable in both directions. It wears a dark grey woven textile strap, described by NOMOS as waterproof, on a winged clasp. The existing silver-white Metro date power reserve also moves to the DUW 4701, so the new calibre becomes the standard Metro engine rather than a limited-run experiment.
The details repay attention, because Braun’s design hides its references in plain sight. NOMOS points out that the stepped hands take their silhouette from the Empire State Building, and that the knurled crown is shaped for grip in the manner of a watchmaker’s tool. The Metro has collected design awards across its twelve years in the catalogue, and the ice-blue treatment shows why the formula endures: the colour does the expressive work while the layout, all dots, white space and one asymmetric aperture, stays exactly where it was. Nothing on the dial announces that the movement behind it is new. That restraint is the point of the model, and arguably of the brand.
Prices are US$4,500 for the Metro date power reserve ice blue and US$5,390 for the Metro neomatik 41 Update ice blue, as reported at launch. Evaluated from the manufacturer’s specifications, the story here is the pattern NOMOS has followed for a decade: deepen the manufacture work a step at a time, keep the design language stable, and let the engineering compound. A quick-set date is not a headline complication. On the watch that announced NOMOS’s independence in 2014, it is the sound of a platform maturing.
