The 5 Best Watches Under $500

In the Venn Diagram of watches that are sporty, tough, nerdy, and nostalgic, you'll find the G-SHOCK DW-6900. Released in February 1995, the DW-6900 is still ticking strong 30 years later with an array of new colors that help spice up this old favorite. Even our pal John Mayer came up with his own colorways for this piece.

Just as it was three decades ago, the DW-6900 boasts 200-meter water resistance in a tough resin exterior. It has other nifty features like a stopwatch, a countdown timer, alarms, an internal calendar until the year 2099, and a very helpful backlight that can be accessed through an oversized "G" button.

If you can spring a little more, the GW6900-1, priced at $140 and released in 2009, is a solar powered descendant that retains virtually all of the DW-6900's features with additional atomic timekeeping, a 48-city world timer, and a solar-powered battery.