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iFixit Completes Teardowns of LG G Watch and Samsung Gear Live Smartwatches

By Ng Chong Seng - on 9 Jul 2014, 9:47am

iFixit Completes Teardowns of LG G Watch and Samsung Gear Live Smartwatches

 LG G Watch. (Image source: iFixit.)

Repair expert iFixit has gotten its hands on the LG G Watch and Samsung Gear Live, the first two Android Wear smartwatches, and has completed the respective teardown.

If the internals fascinate you, you can check out the teardowns in detail (here and here). In a gist, both watches can be taken apart quite easily, due to their use of T5 screws and the lack of adhesive. And both sport a small rubber gasket, which explains their IP67 rating. iFixit says the LG G Watch’s band is slightly more difficult to remove because it requires a traditional spring bar removal tool (or something small and flat like a blade to get into the tiny gap between the strap and the watch), which we disagree slightly. Since the watch comes with a flexible rubber strap, all you need to do is to squeeze it to pop out the pin. Of course, if you replace that with a stiffer strap, subsequent removal won’t be as easy.

Another thing worth noting is that a Bluetooth/Wi-Fi antenna is found in the Samsung Gear Live, and that’s because Wi-Fi support was never mentioned in the Gear Live’s specs. Who knows, maybe Samsung will enable some kind of Wi-Fi Direct feature in the future. That said, we recommend not reading too much into this little discovery.

At the end of the day, iFixit gave the LG G Watch and Samsung Gear Live a repair score of 9 and 8 (out of 10) respectively. Both have points deducted for a fused display assembly, which makes screen replacement expensive. The Gear Live also requires careful handling during repair due to several small adhered-in flexible PCBs.

Samsung Gear Live. (Image source: iFixit.)

Source: iFixit (1, 2, 3).

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