Wearables

Inside the First Android Wear Devices: LG G Watch & Samsung Gear Live Teardown
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Inside the First Android Wear Devices: LG G Watch & Samsung Gear Live Teardown

Last week at IO, Google gave attendees a choice of one of two Android Wear devices to take home and get experience with the platform. Although I personally opted for LG’s G Watch (the display looked better), my friend James Bruce at ARM managed to get both and spent the next day taking them apart. James sent over high res pics of the result and gave us permission to post the images here (Update: ARM posted its own blog on the teardown here). I’m working on a review of Android Wear and the G Watch now (and yes, I have battery life data), but I hadn’t yet taken it apart. 


LG G Watch

The G Watch turns out to be pretty easy to take apart. There are four Torx T5 screws on the back, removing them gives you access to its internals. The 400mAh battery is integrated into the back cover. ARM’s teardown confirms 3.8V chemistry, resulting in a 1.52Wh total capacity. 

 LG G Watch

In the photo above (left) you can see the thin gasket that runs around the perimeter of the G Watch, helping to give it its IP67 rating (fully sealed against dust, submergible in up to 1 meter of water for up to 30 minutes).

Two more screws hold the incredibly small PCB in place. The Qualcomm APQ8026 SoC (4 x Cortex A7 + Adreno 305 graphics) is underneath the Hynix DRAM device. There’s a discrete Qualcomm PM8226 PMIC just south of the SoC.

 LG G Watch

On the flip side of the PCB we see Synaptics’ touch controller (the same model used in the Moto X). 

The Gear Live is also held together by four screws, although dismantling the watch takes a little more effort. The battery and heart rate monitor are both enclosed in the back of the watch. Samsung is also using 3.8V chemistry for its watch battery.

Samsung Gear Live

The logic board in the Gear Live is a bit more complex. There’s a second layer stacked on the main logic board that also acts as an RF can.

 
Samsung Gear Live

We see the same APQ8026 SoC from Qualcomm below a Samsung DRAM device in a PoP stack.

 
Samsung Gear Live

Overall Samsung definitely has the more compact (and complex) internal PCB (the picture at the top of the article compares the two side by side), which makes sense given the company’s relative head start in this space.

There’s been a ton of innovation in the internal layout of smartphones over the years. As these are the very first Android Wear devices, it’ll be interesting to see how the internal structure evolves over the coming years. One thing is for sure: those batteries are going to have to get thinner, or find a new place to live. Perhaps split up and distributed into a watch band?

LG G Watch and Samsung Gear Live Available For Purchase Today
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LG G Watch and Samsung Gear Live Available For Purchase Today

Today at Google IO Google gave the world a sneak peak at some of the features of their upcoming Android Wear OS. They also announced that the first two smartwatches running the new operating system would be available for purchase from Google Play starting today. The first of these is the LG G Watch. Before today information about the G Watch was limited apart from the knowledge that it would be water and dust resistant and sport a 1.2GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 MSM8026 CPU. LG has now updated the product page for the G Watch with some more information. The watch has a 1.65″ IPS display with a resolution of 280×280 for a pixel density of 240ppi, 512MB of RAM, 4GB of NAND, Bluetooth 4.0, and a 400mAh (1.52Wh) battery.

LG also states that the new watches will work with any standard watch strap of 22mm in width. The LG G Watch will be available today on Google Play in both black and white color options.

The second smartwatch that will be available to order today is Samsung’s Gear Live smartwatch which also runs Android Wear. According to Samsung the Gear Live is similar in specifications to the LG G Watch with the same 1.2GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 MSM8026, 512MB of RAM, 4GB of NAND, Bluetooth 4.0, and IP67 rated dust and water resistance. It differentiates itself with its display, sporting a 1.63″ Super AMOLED display with a resolution of 320×320 which works out to a pixel density of 277ppi. The battery in the Gear Live is also smaller than the G Watch with a capacity of 300mAh (1.14Wh). The power usage of the AMOLED display will likely be the factor that determines whether or not the smaller battery capacity results in significantly less battery life than the G Watch. Like other recent Samsung devices the Gear Live also includes a heart rate monitor for tracking heart rate during exercise.

Samsung launching a device running Android Wear is an interesting move as they have moved all their previous smartwatches over to their own Tizen operating system and it will be interesting to see if they pursue both paths or if they eventually transition to smartwatches based on only one operating system. The Gear Live will be available in black and red color options.

Both smartwatches will be available for purchase later today on Google Play and require Android 4.3 or later to work. Based on Google’s Android user statistics that puts the percentage of Android users that can use these new smartwatches at about 24%.

Update:

Both devices are now available on Google Play. The LG G Watch is selling for $229 USD with a listed shipping date of July 3 and the Samsung Gear Live is selling for $199 USD with a shipping date of July 8. In the UK the LG G Watch is £159 while the Samsung Gear Live is £169 making the roles of the cheaper and more expensive smartwatch different depending on where you live.

Source: LG, Samsung