NO.1 D3 Smartwatch Specs, Unboxing and Teardown

There are now many wearables, including fitness bands and smartwatches, on the market, but to me many fail on battery life, visibility, and price. The one that would match my requirements the best would be SMA-Q smartwatch, but in the meantime, I’m also interested in testing some more wearables at different price points. Tinydeal sent me NO.1 D3 smartwatch that sells for just $22.99 shipped. I’ll go first through the specifications, before checking of the watch more closely, and in a few days writing a review of the device.

NO.1 D3 Smartwatch Specifications

You should not expect much for this price, but the watch is surprisingly feature-packed (as taken from tinydeal website):

  • SoC – Mediatek MT6261 processor with 32Mbit RAM, 32Mbit Flash
  • Storage – Internal micro SD slot up to 16GB
  • Display – 1.22″ capacitive touchscreen IPS display with 128×128 resolution
  • Connectivity – Bluetooth 3.0
  • Cellular – 1x micro SIM card slot supporting 2G (GSM 850 / 900 / 1800 / 1900 MHz)
  • Camera – 0.3MP camera on top of the watch
  • USB – 1x micro USB port for charging
  • Sensor – Gravity Sensor, thermometer, heart rate monitor, UV monitor
  • Battery – 350 mAh LiPo battery good for 36 hours in standby time.
  • Waterproof Rating – “Normally Water Resistant”
  • Languages – Chinese, English, French, Russian, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Turkish
  • Dimensions – 250 x 42 x 11 mm
  • Weight: 38 g

The watch ships with a short USB cable, and a user’s manual in English and Chinese. It is compatible with Android 4.3 or above. Features include Bluetooth notifications, call & SMS Reminder, body thermometer, pedometer,  heart rate monitor, sleep monitor, local and remote camera, time display, sedentary reminder, phonebook sync, Bluetooth dialing, hand-free calls, UV Monitor, Anti-Lost, and more..

NO.1 D3 Smartwatch Unboxing

I received the package via DHL, and one advantage of the cheap price is that there’s no custom duty to pay.
NO.1_D3_Watch_package

That’s the retail package with some of the key features on the side.

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Click to Enlarge

The watch comes with a micro USB to USB cable charging, and a simple user’s manual in both English and Chinese with parts of the specifications differing slightly from the specs on Tinydeal.

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Click to Enlarge

The wristband is made of some very flexible rubber, and I believe it should last longer than some other plastic bands I used in the past. You’ll have notice the heart rate monitor sensor on the back of the watch above.

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Click to Enlarge

The only interfaces are one button on one side, and a micro USB port on the other. You can find the camera on the top of the watch, which makes it easy to take horizontal pictures while looking at the watch.

NO.1 D3 Smartwatch Teardown

This teardown is a little different from others, as most of the time end users don’t really need to care about it, but the first steps are useful if you want to replace the battery, or more importantly insert a micro SIM card or micro SD card inside the watch.

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Click to Enlarge

The first step is to pop out the plastic back cover with your fingernails.  At this point it’s very clear the watch is not waterproof, except some drops of rain… The battery is not a 350 mAh LiPo as in the specs, but a 380mAh Li-Ion battery. You can press the bottom side of the battery to take it off.

Click to Enlarge
Click to Enlarge

You’ll then find the IMEI number, a micro SIM slot in the center, and a micro SD slot on the right. Most people won’t need to open it further, and if you do you’ll lose the warranty after removing the four screws.

Click to Enlarge
Click to Enlarge

This will loosen the wristband, and show a little more about the components.

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Click to Enlarge

I did not want to take too many risks, since I still want to review the watch, and I only managed to peak at one component: FT6236GMA touchscreen IC. It should be possible to take out the HRM sensor, and check in my details. But for now I reassembled the watch, and inserted a 32GB micro SD card which was later on properly recognized by the system.
D3_Smartwatch_32GB_micro_SD
Time to charge the watch, before playing a little more.

D3_Smartwatch_Charging

The charge was very fast as in less than 15 minutes the watch was fully charged, but I’m not sure whether the battery already had some charge before. That’s something I’ll have to check out during the next few days.

I’d like to thanks Tinydeal for providing a review sample. If you are interested, you could purchase from them for $22.99 including shipping, but the watch can also be bought from other e-retailers including GearBest, Aliexpress, Amazon US and others.

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15 Comments
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FransM
FransM
8 years ago

Quite interesting. In your review could you (apart from battery life) also say a few words on the quality of the heart rate monitoring. (and can I readout the monitoring afterwards).

Jens
Jens
8 years ago

Did you manage to get a copy of any GPL software on the device?
As far as I can tell from looking at the android application, the device is running some form of simple linux, so at least kernel source should be possible to get…

Paul
Paul
8 years ago

> Mediatek MT6261 processor with 32MB RAM, 32MB Flash

Just to state the obvious, those “MB” are Chinese MB, in reality, they’re Mbit.

Paul
Paul
8 years ago

> I think some people are already hacking on Mediatek MT626x

Feel free to try to boot https://github.com/xobs/fernly

And of course, there’s no Linux there…

Marius Cirsta
8 years ago

@Paul
I tried booting it on a MT6261 and no luck … it won’t work out of the box. Of course with a bit of modification and patience to do some reverse engineering it can work. I’ve tried but unless there’s some interest in this I’m not contributing anymore time to it …

Marius Cirsta
8 years ago

@Jens No GPL stuff here unfortunately. Not that the Chinese care about the GPL anyway but in this case there isn’t any. It boots from a custom bootloader to a RTOS based on Nucleus so everything is “nice” and closed source. There might be some leaks on Chinese websites of the source code or useful docs but all I’ve managed to get is an incomplete datasheet on the SOC. I’ve shared if anyone if interested you cand find it here: http://www.kosagi.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=204 along with some discussion about porting Fernly to this MT6261. It’s very similar to the MT6260 but it’s not… Read more »

ALEXIS
ALEXIS
8 years ago

Hello , this watch is compatible with android and ios ? Also do you have Greek languange support ? Thanks.

manos pitianoudis
manos pitianoudis
8 years ago

Hi,
Do you know the android version that run in smartwatch?

Amos Cortes
Amos Cortes
4 years ago

Where to find the battery?

Khadas VIM4 SBC