HODINKEE NOMOS Tangente Sport

How can you trust a watch review from a website that sells watches “from a growing but carefully curated set of brands”? You can’t. How can you trust a website that creates a HODINKEE NOMOS Tangente Sport Limited Edition and then pretends to review it? Again, you can’t. They’re shameless right from the word go  . . .

“There’s a lot to appreciate about NOMOS Glashütte,” the onanistic “feature” on the Limited Edition HODINKEE NOMOS Tangente Sport begins. “It’s a company that just gets the details right – a quality we appreciate more than anything else.” More than cash? I think not.

HO’DINKEE’s you-scratch-my-back-I’ll-scratch-yours relationship with the watchmaking industry knows no bounds. Reading their “article” on the modified NOMOS, you get the distinct feeling that CEO Benjamin Clymer and his timepiece titans consider Glashütte their bitch. Clock this excerpt’s supercillious tone.

When we started talking with NOMOS’s Saxon headquarters about the Tangente Sport Limited Edition for HODINKEE, we made it clear that we wanted it to be the next NOMOS classic, combining the company’s nearly three decades of watchmaking know-how inside a single watch. 

Meine Damen und Herren, let me be clear: our limited edition watch will be admired by the watch collectors for a thousand years, Reich? I mean, right? I want all three decades of your know-how in this one watch. I don’t care how you do it! You make the watch, we get the money. Verstehen? 

We now return you to your original program: The Truth About Watches.

In a world where a 39mm Rolex Oyster Perpetual is considered dainty, where a 45mm G-SHOCK is par for the parcourse, the 36.5mm HO’DINKEE NOMOS is small. Dance adman! Dance!

The pared-down proportions of 36.5mm by 7.5mm lend itself to both male and female wrists, and we imagine this being the ideal shared watch between two paired-off enthusiasts.

As with most watches from NOMOS, the Tangente Sport Limited Edition for HODINKEE wears slightly larger than the dimensions appear, mainly due to the faceted, wire-style lugs that are a signature of the Tangente line.

This is the first review that I’ve read claiming a watch wears larger than it looks. And did HODINKEE just suggest that the watch is only a good share piece for hetrosexuals? That’s sexist!

I have the sneaking suspicion NOMOS cut a deal with Mr. Clymer’s minions to mod small watches gathering dust in Sächsische Schweiz-Osterzgebirge. Just for fun, check out the above image of a normal-sized NOMOS (39mm) on a normal-sized wrist.

The HODINKEE NOMOS Tangente Sport Limited Edition was limited to 300 pieces – at $2,450 each. The model sold out in less than 24 hours. I don’t know how can you have a “waitlist” for a limited edition watch, but there it isn’t.

Nor do I know much of the $735k gross HODINKEE pocketed for picking out a color scheme, lending their name to the HNTLSE’s caseback and throwing any vestige of editorial integrity under the proverbial bus.

That said, I’m sure there are 300 happy horophiles who couldn’t give a shit that they’re enabling prostitution. Those who do want to get the straight dope on all things horological are welcome here, where our reviewers sleep soundly at night – in their own bed.