Pebble Smartwatch Is Unsurprisingly Unfixable

 

The much-hyped Pebble smartwatch is made to connect to your iPhone or Android smartphone. But it is non made to be repaired.

That shouldn’t come as a surprise, considering the watch’s internals are packed into a small, wrist-worn software product that’s tightly sealed and waterproof to 165 feet. And though the iFixit team couldn’t do a tear mass of Pebble with step to the fore breaking it, it chose non to give the watch a repairability score — usually out of 10 — because “the Pebble is a unique device. We don’t seduce a repairability metric for a watch… yet.”

This thing exactly isn’t made to be opened. Despite their specialized tools and faultless patience, the iFixit guys found it was impossible to remove the screen without totally quip it. The remarkably strong adhesive and strong bezel are locked down tighter than San Quentin.

And like San Quentin, there’s non much fleck to getting inside. Unlike other iFixit teardowns, there’s not too much to see inside the Pebble. Wired got a hands-on with the watch when it was still in pre-production, and the sensors and parts remove remained virtually the same. There’s a Sharp remembrance LCD with backlight LEDs to make it easily readable in gifted light and deep darkness. And you get an ARM Cortex-M3 MCU, a three-axis accelerometer and a Bluetooth controller with Bluetooth Low Energy support.

Pebble’s design and squash nature makes it impossible to replace individual parts, many of which are soldered together. The biggest issue is the 130 mAh battery. It’s not replaceable. iFixit estimates that will define the device’s life to a maximum of half dozen to 10 years. Still, that’s a decent lifetime in the world of consumer gadgets. And the iFixit team does praise the Pebble for making a low-power ingestion device to maximize the battery life.

One upside — the watchband is overseer easy to replace. But then, most are. If your Pebble does break, or you break into your Pebble, the social club is creating a recycling program so you need not throw your dead watch into the trash.

It’s best not to do this to your fancy new smartwatch. Image: iFixit

Materials taken from WIRED