A tale of two Indian watch brands: one old and one new

Argos Apollo III:

This is my second Argos watch, the first being the Argos Apollo II mechanical handwind. Argos is an Indian Microbrand started by two friends/brothers from Mumbai and assembly based out of Gujarat, India.

They claim aside of the movement all other components / parts are sourced from India.

I like to support new businesses because they tend to bring in something fresh and new.

The Apollo II was slightly disappointing because it had QC issues and used a refurbished mechanical swiss FHF ST96 movement to keep costs low.

However, there has been a sea change in the past year with their new release the Apollo III. First they listened to their customers and got in a brand new automatic movement (Sea-Gull 2706 automatic small seconds 21600 bph). They also changed the design up a bit with the small seconds and now lumed hour and minute hands.

I would give this watch a solid 7/10 as it misses out on hacking and a saphire crystal.

Moving on to one of the oldest watch brands in India: HMT (Hindustan Machine Tools). This brand was launched as part of the Indian Government’s initiative to manufacture watches in India in the 1960’s. However with the quartz crisis and cost pressures they had to shut down manufacturing in mid 2010’s. However, now they are back (most likely only assembling and not manufacturing) due to renewed interest in their models by the watch community in India.

The Kohinoor is one of the most iconic watch designs from HMT. It was very popular during the 70-80’s (I remember my grandfather used to wear one). With HMT’s closing it lead to many frankenwatches being sold with aftermarket dials on Amazon/EBay. Quality was never HMT’s strong point so you can imagine how bad these frankenwatches were with third party refurbishing.

In the last few months HMT has been reissuing older models like Kohinoor in smaller quartz and larger automatic movements. I recently bought the HMT Automatic as well but it is quite large (40mm diameter with 48mm L2L). These 36mm quartzes are more palatable.

Only grouse with the Kohinoor quartz is that these could have come with mechanical hand wind movement options as well and their bracelets could have been better. HMT is notorious for their jangly and hollow bracelets. Overall 6/10 due to existing quality issues but 9/10 for nostalgia factor.