I sympathise with you. I'd owned several tactile watches, and without fail most of them had come to a sticky end, usually some considerable time before I wanted to know the actual time of day. Luckily, my fiancee spent some decent cash on a proper one for my birthday a few years back and i have not looked back since . On the flip side, I did use a talking one for those times my tactiles were inoperative - which happened a lot in my youth. you do have to get a finger in the works to read them, and even when closed, i'd found that other things were also interested in getting into them. But I digress... When I bought a talking watch, I looked for a small size, a quiet voice, and a lack of features. I didn't want a calendar, stopwatch, timer nor a rooster upon my wrist. I was lucky to find a very small, very dainty thing (which was almost quite feminine in outline). Suitable pressure upon the surface made it mutter the time into my wrist, thus avoiding alerting half the room. Nowadays, I have my /tactile watch (I hesitate to call them Braille as they don't actually use any). I don't think I could go back, even were my old talking one still in existence. My phone and computer serve for those times I have a gadget in my hands: but yea, verily, nothing screams blindness like a voluble, shrieking timepiece.

I also don't like talking watches all that much. Fortunately the most of the ones I have seen have spoken quietly and looked like a traditional watch. However tactile watches aren't my favourite either. I have owned some of them and all of those had the same problem: Their pointers were too light. For example, you are in a bus and you're checking the time. Because the bus is moving you may accidentally "hit" the pointer with your finger and then usually the minute pointer moves far away from the place it was. I prefer my mobile for this purpose. It does speak but I usually keep the speech volume at around 1 or 2 so it doesn't disturb anyone. By the way, I also hate speech-ecuipped mobile phones whose speech has been set around as loud as it can be.