It is not often that we at aBlogtoWatch write three articles on the same timepiece, but the UTTE gets that treatment. At Baselworld 2013 Arnold & Son released this watch as the world’s (current) thinnest tourbillon. We debuted the UTTE watch for you here. “UTTE” stands for “ultra thin tourbillon escapement,” and it certainly is. Arnold & Son narrowly beat Piaget to production of the thinnest tourbillon ever. Being the most thin isn’t really that important to us. What is important is that the watch is very wearable, and very attractive.

At Baselworld 2013 we got a nice hands-on look at the Arnold & Son UTTE for the first time. It was plainly obvious that the lovely computer renders of the watch barely did it justice. This was by far one of the most elegant tourbillon-based timepieces that we’d seen in a while. Clearly it was going to be a sales success. To make sure though, I wanted to do a final review after checking the watch out for a while. I took the UTTE for a spin.

Let’s put “ultra-thin” into perspective. Piaget still makes most of the thinnest watches around with their manually wound and automatic versions of the Altiplano. If you really just want a crazy thin mechanical watch this is not the best option. Sure it is thin, but you are also paying for the tourbillon part of the equation. The UTTE is 8.34mm thick in total. That is the case and movement together. On the wrist is feels quite slim for sure. Few people could complain otherwise.

The movement is another story. Inside the UTTE is the Arnold & Son in-house made A&S8200 manually wound caliber. It is just 2.97mm thick, and even has a very respectable power reserve. In total, the watch offers about 80 hours of power reserve, which is pretty darn good. That is more than three days without winding. All that is missing is a power reserve indicator.

The tourbillon is clearly a major part of the movement. It is rather large as well, being 14mm wide. In fact the tourbillon diameter is the same as that of the dial that indicates the time. It also doubles as the seconds indicator. As a flying tourbillon there is no top-mounted bridge on the dial, so viewing it is very pleasing. A small arrow on the cage can be used as a seconds indicator. Bring your attention to the rear of the movement to the rear-mounted tourbillon bridge.

You’ll notice that the bridge is hand-decorated with engravings. This is different than the Baselworld prototype UTTE that we wrote about after the show. That movement has simple Cotes de Geneva stripes on the movement, while the final version here has a more sunburst design. Of course the tourbillon bridge is also now hand-decorated which is a very nice touch. The movement looks pretty good, and Arnold & Son continues to demonstrate that they can produce beautiful, original things.