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Longines moves the Conquest Heritage's power reserve to the centre of the dial

Longines has moved the Conquest Heritage's power reserve off a subdial and onto a printed ring in the very centre of the dial.

Hen & Mills Editorial · 4 min read · 8 August 2026

• Longines revives its mid-1950s Conquest as a slim steel dress watch, moving the power reserve indicator from a subdial to the dial's centre.
• A short black pointer sweeps the central ring, its radial numerals reading right way up across the top and upside down along the lower half.
• The collection runs to five references, priced in Australia from A$6,575 on alligator to A$6,825 on the steel bracelet, each with a five-year warranty.

Most power reserve indicators live somewhere we rarely look. They sit in a subdial down near six o'clock, or they curl along an arc at the rim of the dial, and you check them about as often as the fuel gauge on a car you barely drive, which is to say once a week, usually after the watch has already stopped. Longines has decided that is no way to treat a complication you have paid for, and has hauled it into the middle of the dial where it cannot be ignored, on the new Conquest Heritage Central Power Reserve.

This is a re-edition, a modern reading of the Conquest that Longines first sold in the mid-1950s, and it wears its history lightly: 38mm of stainless steel and a dial that looks like it walked out of a decade when a watch was read at a glance rather than scrolled through. The reserve is the twist, and once you have seen it sitting dead centre you struggle to picture the watch without it.

A power reserve you are made to read

The indicator is a printed ring set around the centre of the dial, graduated from zero, with a short black pointer turning on the same axis as the hands. Because the numerals are arranged radially, the ones on the lower half of the ring end up upside down, which sounds like a nuisance and is one, for about a day. After that your eye stops spelling out the figure and starts reading the pointer's position the way you read a clock, and the awkwardness quietly goes away. Around it the dial keeps to essentials, hours, minutes, a running seconds and a framed date, so nothing competes with the reserve for your attention.

A name Longines protected in 1954

The Conquest badge is older than almost anything else Longines makes: the company registered it in 1954, making it the first of its lines to have its name formally protected with the Swiss Federal Institute of Intellectual Property. The case is stainless steel at 38.00mm, a size that slides under a shirt cuff and suits a wrist that stopped enjoying 42mm some years ago. A sapphire crystal carrying several layers of anti-reflective coating on both faces keeps glare off what is a fairly busy dial, and water resistance runs to 5 bar, plenty for rain and the odd splash at the basin though not an invitation to swim laps in it.

Light blue that behaves like a colour, not a costume

Longines offers the watch in five versions, and for my money the light blue opaline is the pick. It reads pale, closer to a chambray shirt put through a hundred washes than to anything you would call navy, light enough to register as a genuine colour while keeping the black printing of the reserve ring perfectly legible, which the darker anthracite and black dials cannot quite pull off. Swiss Super-LumiNova takes care of the dark. The other four, black, anthracite, opaline ivory, and the same light blue on a steel bracelet, are all handsome enough, but the blue is the one that truly earns the central display.

A silicon hairspring behind a Fifties face

Turn to the movement and the value sharpens. Inside is the Longines calibre L896.5, self-winding, beating at 25,200 vibrations an hour on a monocrystalline silicon balance spring, with up to 72 hours held in reserve. Longines lists it as resistant to magnetism, which is really just that silicon hairspring doing its quiet work rather than a feature bolted on for the brochure. The three days matter more here than on most watches, because the dial spends all day announcing how much of the reserve is left, and a 40-hour movement wearing this display would sit looking half-drained by lunchtime on the second day.

Alligator, five bar, and a lot of watch for the money

The reference here, L1.648.4.92.2, arrives on a grey alligator strap with a buckle, and the pairing settles what the Conquest has become. A steel sports name from the 1950s has grown into a dress watch, and the alligator and the 5 bar rating agree on the point, that this is a watch for a desk and a dinner and quietly out of its depth at the pool. The only thing this Conquest is likely to conquer is the reservation.

What stays with you, though, is the sheer amount of watch on the table. A silicon balance spring, three days of reserve and a genuinely unusual central display, wrapped in 38mm of steel and sold for under A$7,000, is the sort of specification that not long ago cost a good deal more, and the five-year warranty Longines puts behind it reads like a brand that has done the arithmetic and likes its own answer.

Longines Conquest Heritage Central Power Reserve pricing and availability

The Conquest Heritage Central Power Reserve is available now from Longines in Australia across the five references. On the Australian site the versions on an alligator strap are listed at A$6,575, while the light blue opaline on a steel bracelet is A$6,825. Every reference carries Longines' five-year warranty.