Sawfish

From AsteroidOS

Sawfish (Huawei Watch 2) and sawshark (Huawei Watch 2 4G/LTE) are a series of round sports-styled watches with a lot of features.


Warning: This watch is often confused with the Huawei watch GT series. These are not capable of running a full version of linux and so will likely never run AsteroidOS.

Description

Sawfish is a rather compact plastic watch with 2 buttons and an OLED display. They have most of the features you might want - GPS, compass, NFC, a speaker, step counter and heartrate sensor.

Support under AsteroidOS is reasonable but broken USB causes some annoyances.

Variants

  • Huawei Watch 2 is the standard version. It comes with a plastic case and plastic buttons. It takes 20mm straps, and comes with integrated straps preinstalled though these can be replaced.
  • Huawei Watch 2 4G/LTE (sawshark) is just like the standard version but comes with LTE. It has a plastic case, but with metal buttons, so that's a way of telling it apart. Removing the 'top' strap will reveal a sim card slot.
  • Huawei Watch 2 2018 is the china version of the 4G/LTE. It replaces the sim card slot with an esim.
    Note that the above three versions are plastic. these regularly show up on Ebay with broken lugs, which suggests that these are easy to break. Be careful!
  • Huawei Watch 2 Classic is a sawfish (no LTE) that comes in a metal case with 22mm straps. This does not suffer from the issue of fragile lugs. There is no metal version of sawshark due to issues with the permeation of a 4G signal. It should be possible to swap sawshark internals into a sawfish body, but it is not known how severely this affects the connection.

Repair

All sawfish are held together from the back with 4 torx t2 screws and are sealed with a rubber O-ring (no glue to negotiate, water resistance is not compromised after opening). Parts show up from time to time, and there are many watches out there for parts with broken lugs.

Miscellaneous hardware docs

Keys

The upper key is the power key.

Manually getting to fastboot

Press and hold the power button when the manufacturer bootlogo appears, until the vibration finishes. Release the button and press it again quickly. The time frame for this method is short and might need several attempts. Some users report that repeated power button presses already during the vibration helps.