The Pebble smartwatch let's you access your smartphone with actually touching it, which makes it both extremely useful and completely unnecessary... And catnip for tech and gamer types. Appealing to a certain brand of curious mind, it shouldn't come as surprise that someone would try to take it apart. It also shouldn't surprise you to find that, at a certain point, devices get too small to withstand amateur dismantling.
When the gadget teardown experts at iFixit tried to break down and examine the Pebble's guts, they found it was impossible to open the phone's casing without cracking the device's screen.
According to the site, the case is waterproofed with an excessive amount of adhesive and the bezel around the screen covers the only potentially safe place to open the device. Consumers will be pleased to know that it isn't so easy to break. Those who do manage to break it, though, will be left unable to get under the hood and make repairs.
"We manage to part the cases, leaving the stubborn smartwatch in only slightly better condition than if we had bombarded it with actual pebbles until it popped open," iFixit explains.
If it's any consolation, they also say the smartwatch's Hex Bright back-lit display does look pretty cool.
The teardown also revealed that the Pebble's battery life should only last 6-10 years. I would expect that anyone who buys a smartwatch would either buy a new one or stop wearing a watch altogether long before that, but anyone expecting to hold onto their Pebble for life may find themselves severely disappointed.
