The Digital Skeptic: 10 Watches You're Now Naked Without

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- What happened to the art of telling time?

Have you noticed? Everything in this noisy digital age seems to tell time: the phone. The car. The stove. Each proffers up a cheesy, numeric rubric that does nothing but cheapen the seconds it counts.

But even these time-worn eyes are seeing a glimmer of hope for time staging a comeback. Better watches, mostly with analog faces and old-school mechanical movements, are finding new customers. According to the Federation of the Swiss Watch Industry, last year broke records for watch exports.

"Leaving aside 2010, which followed a major downturn," said the report, "growth surpassed anything seen in the past 20 years."

Which makes this holiday season the perfect time to celebrate the return of watches. So I offer my top timepieces for 2012. Put any of these on your wrist, or on the wrist of those you love, and you will give the greatest gift of all: not merely telling time, but exquisitely keeping it:

Kent Wang Bauhaus
Price: $350

Old-school, high-end mechanical watchmakers are cringing at what League City, Texas-based Kent Wang is offering in terms of automatic wristwatches. The Bauhaus is a well-made, no battery, power-it-yourself timepiece -- your movement powers the watch -- for just $350, which makes this a throwback to mechanical watches at a reasonable cost. Wang deserves real props for making a non-digital watch more people can afford. I liked the clean, easy-to-read face and the surprisingly good quality for the price. You will find some discussion among watch snobs as to just how much of a knockoff this Asian-made movement is. But at these prices, this watch geek is not complaining.

Even better, you can reliably order one online and it comes in a nice gift box, which makes this the impulse timepiece for the year.

Montblanc Star Large
Price: $1,520