LG Watch Urbane teardown reveals surprisingly repairable hardware

Scorpus

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A couple of weeks ago, iFixit got their hands on the Apple Watch for their usual teardown, finding it was very tightly packed and somewhat difficult to upgrade. iFixit is back this week with another teardown of a smartwatch, this time LG's Watch Urbane, and their findings suggest this watch could be a lot more repairable.

The Watch Urbane is a round smartwatch, and iFixit found that it was using the same 245 PPI 320 x 320 P-OLED display as its brother, the G Watch R, which isn't hugely surprising. However you'll want to keep this display in pretty good condition, as if the protective glass cracks, it will be a pain to replace due to the way the display, digitizer and glass are glued together.

The rest of the watch is fairly easy to access. All of the critical components are located on the one motherboard, which includes a Snapdragon 400 SoC with 512 MB of SK Hynix DDR2, 4 GB of memory, and a range of sensors. Opening the Watch Urbane to access the motherboard does break the water resistant sealing, though, which will need to be replaced upon reconstruction.

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Underneath the motherboard is an easily-replaceable 410 mAh battery, the same size as the G Watch R's battery, and larger than both the Moto 360 (300 mAh) and Apple Watch (205 mAh). Combined with an OLED panel that can efficiently display a watch face, the Watch Urbane should have quite decent battery life.

iFixit also notes that the 22mm band attached to the Watch Urbane is easy to swap out, as it's a standard size that is secured to the watch via spring bars. Included with the Urbane is a nice leather band, though you could replace it with something else to suit your style.

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Huh...I never thought of a watch as being "hardware"
But this is not a proper watch, it's more of a gadget and is not much more than an extension of your smartphone which has the ability to display the time on your wrist. Heaven alone knows why anybody would want one.
 
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