Redline Hybrid Watch Face

Redline is a performance instrument cluster for the wrist: a knurled bezel, a raised hour ring, a sunken second track with a red zone cut into it, and a backlit trip computer across the base of the dial.

THE RED ZONE
The second hand is a tachometer pointer, and its red tip runs into the red zone for the last ten seconds of every minute. That is where the zone is drawn and it is where the name comes from. The minute hand crosses the same arc once an hour.

THE TWO WELLS
CHARGE is your watch battery on a real needle, swinging across a marked E-to-F scale in the left well. OAT is the outside air temperature in the right well, under a condition glyph - clear, partly cloudy, cloud, rain, snow or storm - that the face works out for itself.

THE TRIP COMPUTER
A recessed panel behind amber glass runs along the base of the dial. Its clock is cut as real seven-segment shapes rather than a typeface imitating them, and it takes 12- or 24-hour on its own, whatever the phone is set to. A chamfered plaque above it carries the date and opens your calendar when you tap it.

COMPLICATIONS
Two complications sit side by side on the lit glass. Heart rate on the left out of the box, your step count on the right. Both take short text and both accept Empty, and short text is the only type they take - a progress arc or a picture will not fit there, so nothing you assign to them is squeezed in or cropped. Each one draws the icon its own provider supplies, so a complication you reassign never keeps the old picture.

AN APP SHORTCUT UNDER THE WORDMARK
One image-only slot, centred beneath REDLINE. It ships empty, and empty here means nothing at all is drawn: no socket, no plus sign, just bare guilloche. Point it at an app on the watch and the socket appears with your icon seated in it.

ALWAYS-ON
Not the dial dimmed, and not a second design either - the same instrument reduced to its cut lines. The red zone stays, the twelve hour marks stay, the CHARGE scale keeps its needle, and the seat of the trip computer keeps the clock. The bezel, the numerals, the guilloche and the floors of both wells are simply left out. Measured at 2.5 per cent of the screen lit.

MAKE IT YOURS
Three instrument trims: Ember, Cobalt and Lime. The dial field stays graphite on all three and only the illumination changes, the way cluster lighting does in a car. With the 12- and 24-hour choice that is six setups, every one of them set on the watch itself. There is no phone app to install.

WEATHER NEEDS ONE PERMISSION, ONCE
Wear OS does not grant watch faces location access by default, so until you allow it the OAT well shows its scale and a dash instead of a temperature: Settings > Security and privacy > Permission manager > Location > Watch faces > Allow while using the app. Everything else - time, date, steps, heart rate and the CHARGE gauge - works the moment you install it.

The face's own labels are in English.

If you have a question, or something is not working right, please write to us at [email protected].