Compared to electronic movements, mechanical watches are less accurate, often with errors of seconds per day, and they are sensitive to position and temperature. Those are the watches you need to “wind.”

Electronic watches have few or no moving parts, as they use the a tiny quartz to provide a stable time base for a mostly electronic movement. Electronic watches are often called quartz watches. They are geared to drive mechanical hands on the face of the watch in order to provide a traditional analog display of the time, which is still preferred by most consumers.

Whereas mechanical movements can typically be off by several seconds a day, an inexpensive quartz movement in a child's wristwatch may still be accurate to within 500 milliseconds per day—ten times better than a mechanical movement.