14 DAY TRIAL // Like it happens with many new devices that arrive on the market, it is now the turn of the new Samsung Gear 2 to get the teardown treatment.
For those who are curious to see what lies under the hood of the smartwatch, the guys over at iFixit are happy to oblige, so they have taken the cap off Samsung’s latest venture into wearables.
The Gear 2 is pretty small, so it was quite unexpected to find the number of components that has been crammed under the minuscule hood.
The first step was to remove the strap, which was pretty easy to do. The rear case comes off quite quickly too, because it’s held into place by virtue of four simple screws.
A detail that might prove worthy for users at some point in the future is that the battery can easily be taken out and can be replaced with another one, in case this is needed. Basically, all one needs to do is remove the cover and go for the battery pull-tab in order to get it out.
In order to keep everything mashed in together, Samsung has filled the insides of the Gear 2 with foam tape, as opposed to using glue and resin like other device manufactures.
To make the Gear 2 smartwatch water resistant, Samsung uses gaskets to enclose the case and the screws.
The little camera that lives in the bezel turns out to come out of the case pretty easily. The snapper can record 720p video at 30 fps or shoot 2MP photos.
As you can see in the photographs provided by iFixit, the mainboard is the central component of the smartwatch and all the other hardware is attached to it. The mainboard is home to chips, memory and can be easily pulled out, too.
There’s also a caveat, consisting of the fact that Samsung fused the back of the display assembly to the display, so that means that in case the screen is damaged or broken, the whole assembly will have to be replaced.
iFixit gives the Samsung Gear 2 a final reparability score of eight points out of ten, which is pretty good. Compare that to the HTC One M8 flagship smartphone, which only managed to score two points.
The Samsung Gear 2 has a 1.63-inch screen with 320 x 320 pixel resolution (the same as the original Galaxy Gear) and is powered by a 1GHz processor combined with 512MB of RAM and 4GB of internal storage. And now you can really take a look at those hardware pieces.
