Even as someone who's invested in modular, repairable technology, it's rare to hear about a repairable "smart" watch. Google's Pixel Watch 4 is setting a bar, but it's still the exception rather than the rule, especially across the industry. Gear that small and that tightly packaged is hard to make sustainable, to the point even the EU added a carve-out to its e-waste rules.
Una was founded by Lewis Allison, the former CTO of Scottish golf watch company Shot Scope. The company's slogan is "one watch for life," but it's not charging a premium for the hardware, which costs $249. Right now, it's clear that modularity brings along with it some compromises which mean Una won't work for everyone.
The Una watch looks like any generic 46mm GPS running watch you'll find on the shelves next to Garmin and Suunto.
Up front, there's a 1.2-inch Memory In Pixel LCD display with a 240 x 240 resolution covered by a hardened mineral glass crystal. If you have a Torx T3 on hand, you'll find the watch breaks down into six parts, each of which can be swapped out. After you've removed the display module, you'll find two discrete sensor modules: one for GPS, one for Bluetooth.
Below that is the Core section, containing the main guts of the watch, including the Cortex-M33 microcontroller.
The cell is expected to last for between seven and 10 days on a single charge, with GPS performance pledged to be 20 hours.
Remember that modularity introduces compromises, and a fairly big one is how much punishment the Una watch can take.
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