---
title: "Scottish Open-Source Watch Charges by USB-C and Unscrews for Repairs"
description: "A reviewer finds rough edges but long battery life and genuine repairability in the £180 Una Watch."
author: "rews desk"
published: 2026-10-02T11:34:48Z
modified: 2026-10-02T14:17:53Z
url: https://rews.cc/a/scottish-open-source-watch-charges-by-usb-c-and-unscrews-for-da8080
language: en
tags: ["hardware", "open-source", "smartwatch", "usb-c", "repairability", "tech"]
publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)"
---

# Scottish Open-Source Watch Charges by USB-C and Unscrews for Repairs

*A reviewer finds rough edges but long battery life and genuine repairability in the £180 Una Watch.*

By rews desk · October 2, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/scottish-open-source-watch-charges-by-usb-c-and-unscrews-for-da8080

## In brief

- A reviewer endorsed the £180 Una Watch, an open-source, repairable smartwatch designed in Edinburgh
- USB-C charging took just over an hour; after a day of GPS and notifications the battery was at 95%
- The always-on memory-in-pixel screen is readable in daylight; four buttons replace a touchscreen
- Notifications took repeated reinstalls to work; the SDK is open source but the firmware is not
- The watch lacks tap-to-pay, a microphone, a speaker and maps; it was £120 secondhand on eBay

A £180 open-source smartwatch that charges from a standard USB-C cable and comes apart with a screwdriver has won over a skeptical British technology writer, according to a hands-on review published on Friday.

The writer, Terence Eden, was reviewing the Una Watch, designed in Edinburgh by a startup founded by Lewis Allison, the former chief technology officer of the Scottish golf-watch company Shot Scope, according to [Engadget](https://www.engadget.com/2267443/una-watch-review/). Mr. Eden picked up his watch secondhand on eBay for £120; it now sells new for £180.

By his own description, Mr. Eden is a “USB-C Maximalist” who wants every gadget on the same cable, with no magnetic charging pucks. From a flat battery, the Una reached a full charge in a little over an hour, drawing about 5 volts and 0.17 amps — never more than 0.84 watts. Slow, but fast enough, he wrote, to fully charge on most public transport in London.

After a full day of use, with GPS, notifications, heart-rate monitoring, step counting and “a bunch of fiddling,” the battery still read about 95 percent. Mr. Eden noted it can even be plugged into a phone to leach a little power from it.

The screen stays on all the time, but it is neither OLED nor eInk: it is a memory-in-pixel display, a black background with orange, blue and white pixels, readable in daylight with the backlight off. There is no touchscreen. Four buttons handle up, down, select and back, and Mr. Eden confessed to “repeatedly jabbing at the screen to no avail.”

Getting notifications working took effort. The official Android app — itself not open source — refused to let him toggle them on, and an app-store fix did nothing. Unpairing, repairing and reinstalling finally brought them to life. Even then, some messages displayed question marks in place of unusual Unicode characters, and there is no notification history, which he called an odd decision for a device with 4GB of storage.

The app store already carries community-built apps, including Doom, though the watch must restart after each installation. Owners are not tied to the official app: the open-source Gadgetbridge works well, he wrote, aside from installing apps and setting alarms. Plugged into a computer, the watch simply appears as about 3.5GB of exFAT storage, with editable JSON files.

A full open-source SDK is available, though development has to be done in C++, a language Mr. Eden said he learned in the last century and wishes he had forgotten. The firmware remains closed, at least for now.

The omissions may matter more to some buyers than to him: no tap-to-pay or NFC, no microphone, no speaker beyond a buzzer that makes “squeaks and squawks,” no way to reply to notifications and no maps or directions yet. Some of that can be fixed in software, he wrote; the rest is hardware.

Serious athletes will probably want a more polished, more expensive device, he concluded, and anyone tied to Apple or Google will want one of theirs. But for tinkerers, and for anyone who wants to back a British company building something open, “technology should be Open Source, repairable, and give control to its users.”