The first smartwatches powered by Google's new Android Wear operating system have begun shipping, and the folks over at AnandTech have managed to get their hands on some units to give them the full teardown treatment.
The LG G Watch was the first model taken apart, revealing a compact PCB on the front compartment, seated above a 400 mAh, 1.52 Wh battery. The PCB itself (pictured above) features a Qualcomm APQ8026 SoC, which contains four ARM Cortex-A7 chips alongside Adreno 305 graphics, plus a small PMIC and Synaptics touchscreen controller.
The design of the G Watch itself is quite basic, so it's no surprise to find that inside the components are laid out in an unsurprising fashion.
Samsung has had a few more tries at producing a smartwatch, and the internals of their new Gear Live above show this. The PCB of the Gear Live is smaller and more complex, featuring two layers to it, and there's a separate space for the heart-rate monitor. Like the G Watch, it's powered by an APQ8026 SoC, although it uses Samsung DRAM instead of Hynix.
The Gear Live features a smaller battery than the G Watch at just 1.14 Wh, but by early accounts the battery life from both smartwatches is average at best. It's interesting to see that the batteries in both devices take up a lot of the internal space, which contributes to their chunky design: something that will no doubt be improved in future models.
For all the images from the teardown, head over to AnandTech.
