The PAM 323 has a couple of useful complications, some easier to use than others. Adding to the theme of practicality is a whopping 10 day power reserve, the display of which is located at 6 o’clock on the dial. Upon receiving the watch, I fully wound and set it. After that I didn’t have to fiddle with it once all week. If you’re the kind of person that finds winding your watch to be a chore, the 323 is easy to fall in love with.
If you’re going to have a 10 day power reserve, accuracy is important. What good is it having a watch that doesn’t need to be touched otherwise if you need to reset it anyway? After setting the watch against an atomic clock, I let it run for 3 days before referencing the same atomic clock for seconds gained or lost. It had gained less than 2 seconds. This means that wearing the watch over the course of the 10 day reserve should result in fewer than 7 seconds of total accuracy lost. This is only one example, and regulations on each particular watch can differ, but take this as a good sign that once you wind and set, you won’t have to worry about losing or gaining any significant amount of time with the 323.
There is another useful complication on the 323, and that is a 24hr hand, complete with an am/pm indication. The GMT hand is the same color as the dial, save for the luminous triangle at its tip. This hand is set along with the minute hand, by pulling the crown out 2 stops (this also zeros the seconds hand at 9 o’clock). The time on the dial is read via two numbers, the 12 and 6, and hour batons. While this makes reading the time at a glance very easy, it makes reading the GMT hand at a glance a bit of a hassle. To get a read, you must first consult the am/pm indicator and then calculate the hour of your second time zone based on its position around the dial. Not difficult, but a good bit harder than using a GMT Master, for example.