Review of my cooking Skmei

Skmei is known for producing digital watches that are mostly based on Casio models. Whether this model (the 1278) is an homage/clone of a Casio too I do not know - if you do then please leave a comment.

The overall design is nice. The squarish copper (-coloured) ring around the dial gives a nice contrast, and makes the text on it much easier to read than on the one Casio I own. The text is etched in on left/right side of the dial (pusher descriptions), but printed above and below the dial (general watch info). By quartz standards it is not a thin watch, but just about 12.8mm thickness is fine with me.

For functionality we have 4 pushers as in so many quartz digitals, and for the more complete functionality you better keep the instruction leaflet - with a Casio you can download the thing 10 years after purchase, but I would not trust that this is an option here. Anyway, we have a variety of options here, of which alarm and countdown timer seem the most interesting ones. Yes, I used the timer for cooking a few times already. On a couple of occasions I managed to accidentally hit the bottom right pusher. This isn't too bad as it just switches between 12/24h display.

The plastic (silicon?) band is quite comfy, especially during a hot sommer.

The one big drawback of the watch is that the display is not readable from all angles. Tilting it a bit leaves you with something like this

I am not the first to observe this: another buyer on Ali mentioned that very issue in their customer review. If there was an equivalent Casio out there I strongly suspect that it does not suffer from this angled visibility problem.

The big plus is the price: I bought this for £9.95 including shipping from China; currently it is a little bit more. Definitely worth the money.

Addition: the Skmei 1278 is indeed cloning the looks of a Casio, the W-96H. This seems to be a discontinued model, with new old stock appearing on ebay regularly (going rate: £19), while not too many online retailers stock it. The colour scheme is different, the Casio has a silver-coloured rectangle instead. Other colours were once available, are now rare, and the copper-coloured variant is exceptionally rare (and priced accordingly). The Casio does not suffer (is less affected by) the tilting issue. The only real drawback of the Casio W-96H is that it does not have a countdown timer - which is a big deal, because if that's the function you want you either have the Skmei, or - a different Casio.