The quick verdict
Your Casio GW-M5610U has a feature you might not know about: time swap. It instantly exchanges your home time with a world time city you have picked, so the watch runs on local time wherever you land. The killer detail is that your alarms keep their integrity: a 5 AM alarm still fires at 5 AM, just in the new time zone. It takes a couple of seconds, it works both ways, and it makes the G-Shock a much better travel watch than most people realise.
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Why swap instead of just changing the time
When you travel, you could just manually reset the watch to local time. The problem is your alarms. Say you get up at 5 AM every day, and you have a 1 PM alarm to take medication. If you manually change the time setting the lazy way, those alarms can end up tied to your home time, which means your 5 AM alarm might go off at 2 in the afternoon local time. That is a real problem for a medication reminder.
With a time swap, the watch treats the new city as home. Your 5 AM alarm goes off at 5 AM in the new zone, your 1 PM reminder goes off at 1 PM in the new zone. Everything you set keeps working exactly as intended, just shifted to where you actually are. As you move between countries on a trip, swapping is far quicker than repeatedly editing the time by hand.
How to do the time swap (module 3495)
This feature is not exclusive to the GW-M5610U, but this is the watch I own that has it, and this is the procedure on its 3495 module:
- Enter World Time mode.
- Scroll to the city you are travelling to and select it. In my video I used Athens for a holiday in Greece, stored in world time slot 2. The small display shows that city’s current time.
- Hold the A and B buttons together. That is it. The swap happens instantly: your home time and the selected world time trade places.
- Go back to the home screen. It now shows local time in your destination, and your alarms are set to fire in that time zone.
There is a neat confirmation built in: after the swap, if you return to World Time mode, the slot that held Athens now holds your home city instead, Vancouver in my case. The two cities have literally exchanged places, which is what makes reversing it so easy.
Swapping back when you get home
When the trip is over, repeat the exact same steps. Go into World Time mode, find the slot that now stores your home city, and hold A and B again. The cities swap back, your home time is home again, and Athens goes back into its world time slot for next time. No reprogramming, no resetting alarms, and hopefully not too much jet lag.
Who this is for
Anyone who travels with a G-Shock and relies on its alarms should know this feature exists. It turns a minor travel annoyance, re-setting the watch and double-checking every alarm at both ends of a trip, into a two-button hold. It is also a good reason to set up your world time slots before a trip: put your destination in a slot ahead of time, and landing becomes a five-second job.
Pros and cons
Pros
- Swaps home and world time in seconds with one button hold
- Alarms fire at the same local times in the new zone, no reprogramming
- Fully reversible with the same steps when you get home
- Works on the watch itself, no app or phone needed
Cons
- Hidden feature: many owners never discover it
- You need to have your destination set up in a world time slot first
- Not every Casio module offers it, so check your manual for your model
FAQ
What is the G-Shock time swap feature?
It exchanges your home time with a selected world time city, so the watch runs on the new city’s time as its main time, including all alarms. On the GW-M5610U you do it from World Time mode by holding the A and B buttons together.
Do my alarms still work after a time swap?
Yes, and that is the point of the feature. An alarm set for 5 AM fires at 5 AM local time in the new time zone, instead of firing at the equivalent of your home time.
Which module does the GW-M5610U use?
The 3495 module. Other Casio models offer time swap too, but the button sequence can vary, so check the manual for your specific watch.
Final verdict
Time swap is the most underrated travel feature on the Casio GW-M5610U. Learn the one button hold before your next trip and your watch, and every alarm on it, lands in the new time zone with you. It takes seconds, and once you have used it, manually re-setting a watch on a plane feels like the stone age.