When my Toq smart watch stopped accepting charge, and I was told I wasn’t eligible for a warrantee repair because I received it as a gift (seriously Qualcomm?) I figured I might as well try repairing it, or at least finding out what was inside.
Continue reading User serviceable parts inside: Replacing a smartwatch battery
Category: Reverse Engineering
Waterproof hardware lacking waterproof firmware
Designing a smartwatch, making it waterproof is a no brainer. The Qualcomm Toq does an elegant job on the hardware, with only capacitive buttons and inductive charging, there’s no need for any kind of wholes in the body. But I was surprised to discover that the firmware isn’t waterproof. When the watch is immersed or gets many water droplets on it as a pictured above, it interprets each droplet as a touch and the UI goes crazy, paging through menues etc. Crushed under this erroneous touch spam, it crashes and locks up pretty quickly.
Lesson: Always test everything and remember to waterproof your firmware.