Gadgetory

one of my favorite smartwatches is a watch made from an actual watch company the fossil queue I've tried other smartwatches but they're cheap feeling faced and bands always leave me feeling like I'm not actually wearing a real watch and well now it's time to do that thing I do with every piece of tech that I like take it apart as always I'm going to turn the watch off first and then flip it over to the back so I can remove the four small Phillips head screws that hold the metal band to the brains it was surprisingly easy to separate the two from each other it's literally just the four tiny screws doing all the holding watches generally aren't abused too much so the four screws will definitely be sufficient I was just a little surprised there wasn't more now the back of this watch is plastic this is because the wireless charging doesn't work through metal so it's plastic out of necessity you can see as I pull the black back off it has some yellowish glue and a black rubber gasket this fossil watch has an ip67 rating same as the original Apple watch so huge thumbs up for water resistance you can see the metal contact points from the wireless charger on the inside of the black panel these just rest up against the two motherboard pins to transfer power and then from the motherboard the power goes onto the battery there are three ribbon cables here the top two are for the LCD screen and the digitizer and then the bottom tiny little guy is just for the battery these are the same Lego light connections that we see on every single cell phone there are two t5 screws holding the board down remember I always link the tools that I use in the video description so if you want one of these toolkits click there I'll link to watch down there for kicks and giggles as well now this board is soldered onto the watch frame this could be a way to ground the board like you see in all the iPhones but it is slightly unfortunate because it brings repairability down a notch either way we can still see all the important things from here and I can keep my watch functional as we review it down at the bottom we have the microphone hole and it's ribbon connector it just gets plugged into the motherboard when the motherboard gets pressed back down into the frame on the bottom of the motherboard we have this battery it is a 1.5 2 watt hour and 3.8 volts and the little spinning doohickey over here is the vibration motor for your notifications as it spins you get the vibrating sensation on your wrist now the gold part you see here with the ribbon cables is the back of the LCD it looks like this is the type of screen that if you want to replace you have to break the old one out of the frame first I did a brief search for replacement parts and I didn't find any but I'll keep the video description updated if they become available in the future the button on the side of the watch has three golden contact points on the inside and you can see the motherboard also has three pins that rest up on these contact points so it can receive the signal from the button I'll push the motherboard and battery back down into place and make sure it clicks into the microphone plug then I'll get those two t5 screws back into place as well and then clip the battery ribbon and the two screen ribbons down like little Legos at this point the watch can turn on if it doesn't the watch just might need to be charged up for a few minutes to restore power to the motherboard make sure that the plastic back of the watch is lined up with the two charging contact points on the motherboard before putting it down into place and then the whole contraption can be put back inside of the thick heavy metal watch band and screw it into place if you want to see one of the first Android smartwatches ever built that I took apart a few years ago go ahead and click that link on-screen and hit that subscribe button if you want to stay on the bleeding edge of tech I took apart the Apple watch as well thanks for watching I'll see you around