Terrible LED? I thought that blue illuminator was super cool. And it was actually an EL film, not an LED.
The EL light was super, very bright and very well distributed (because the whole backlight film would light up). I'm surprised they managed to put one in such a small watch as EL film needs fairly high voltages, you could hear the switching coil whine when it was on :P Yet it still lasted a good while on battery.