劳力士帕德洛尼一年只需调一次日期

On the evening of April 30th, the date on an ordinary watch is completely correct.

After midnight, however, it might display 'April 31st'.

The problem is not with timekeeping, but with the calendar: ordinary date mechanisms count numbers but do not know that months vary in length.

Rolex's Padellone, launched this year, was designed starting from this small inconvenience.

It uses a complete annual calendar that can distinguish between months with thirty days and those with thirty-one.

When April ends, the date jumps directly from the 30th to May 1st.

Since May has thirty-one days, the mechanism waits one more day before moving into June.

The wearer does not need to take out their phone to reset the date every short month.

Rolex calls this design the Haplos system.

The month disk transmits 'which month it is now' to the date mechanism.

Therefore, the date mechanism knows whether the month should end on the 30th or the 31st.

A very simple calendar rule has been transformed into mechanical actions inside the watch.

This watch has a second feature: the calendar jumps simultaneously at midnight.

The day of the week, month, and date all enter the new day in an instant.

The day of the week and the month are displayed in two windows at the twelve o'clock position.

A blue hand points to the date on the outer ring of the dial.

At the six o'clock position, there is also a moon phase disk, showing the moon going from a thin crescent to full, and then slowly back to a thin crescent.

Thus, the calendar month and the lunar cycle are placed on the same dial.

However, an 'annual calendar' is not the same as a 'perpetual calendar'.

The Padellone can handle thirty-day and thirty-one-day months, but it cannot judge February on its own.

February has twenty-eight days in common years and twenty-nine days in leap years.

Every year when late February transitions into March, the wearer still needs to manually adjust it once.

This is also its capability boundary: most month-ends in a year are handled by mechanics, while the shortest month, February, is left to humans.

The name Padellone also comes from a historical full-calendar wristwatch by Rolex.

Collectors call the 1949 Model 8171 the Padellone, and the new watch has reused this name.

Both the old and new watches allow people to see the complete calendar at a glance, but the new watch adds a new instantaneous jumping mechanism.

Its Caliber 7190 movement runs at five hertz, and Rolex says the related design involves thirty patent applications.

These numbers are complex, but what the wearer can truly see is still that moment at midnight: three calendar informations changing simultaneously.

Updating the date on a mobile phone is easy, so much so that you might not even notice it.

Mechanical watches, however, turn calendar rules into gears, levers, and hands, making the moment of date change visible.

By the end of February next year, will you wait for it to change on its own, or remember to help it adjust first?