Now that the first smartwatches featuring Android Wear software are shipping, the folks at iFixit decided to rip them apart and see what they could learn about the hardware behind those watches.
It turns out the Samsung Gear Live and LG G Watch are easier to take apart and repair than a typical smartphone, earning high marks from the repair shop for ease of disassembly and replaceable components including straps and batteries.
Interestingly, while the Samsung Gear Live watch with Android Wear looks nearly identical to the Tizen-powered Gear 2 smartwatch (at least until you turn on the display), iFixit tore apart one of Samsung’s new Tizn watches too and it turns out that while some of the internal bits including the 512MB RAM chip are the same, other chips including the sensors, microcontroller and CPU are a bit different.
While LG’s G Watch has similar specs to the Gear Live, including, 512MB of RAM, and 4GB of flash, the two devices have different touchscreen controllers, different RAM chips, and the Gear Live has a 9-axis accelerometer and gyroscope while the G Watch has a 6-axis motion sensor.
In other words, while Google may be requiring Android Wear device makers to make sure the software looks and works the same way across different watches from different vendors it looks like manufacturers have a bit of freedom in choosing the actual hardware they’ll use.
Both watches have the same 1.2 GHz Qualcomm Snpadragon 400 (APQ8026) quad-core processor though.