Last week, the LG G Watch and the Samsung Gear Live were officially announced and went up for pre-orders. We got some hands on time with both of those, as well as the Moto 360 last week at Google I/O. Justin has also already done his review of the Samsung Gear Live, and in case you missed that, you can check that out here. Both of these smartwatches have relatively the same specs. Although the Samsung Gear Live has an AMOLED display compared to the IPS on the LG G Watch. Also the LG G Watch has a slightly larger battery at 400mAh compared to 300mAh in the Samsung Gear Live.
This teardown of both smartwatches does confirm that the Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 chipset does indeed power them both. And yes, this is the same processor that powers mid-range smartphones like the Moto G and the HTC One Mini 2. It’s the APQ8026 with 4 Cortex A7 based CPUs and the Adreno 305 GPU. However, it’s an APQ instead of an MSM because there is no modem. Because well, the G Watch and the Gear Live do not have WiFi, LTE or 3G connections. Some reviews we’ve seen have showed us that the reason for the Snapdragon 400 being implemented into these smartwatches is not for performance or for power, but because it’s the easiest to implement.
It also appears that only one core of the Snapdragon 400 is being used in these devices. Not really surprised at that, as I think a quad-core processor might be a bit overkill for your smartwatch, but only using one-core might be a bit better, especially for battery life. Because it’s not like these Android Wear devices are doing as much as your phone is. How many of you have already ordered either the LG G Watch or the Samsung Gear Live? Let us know in the comments below.
