Google earlier this month launched its next generation Pixel 4 and Pixel 4 XL smartphones at a special event in New York. Soon after their launch, the Pixel 4 smartphones earned praises not just for the ingenuinity of the technology that they use but also for their overall performance. Now, iFixit has shared a teardown of the Pixel 4 XL smartphone has revealed that the phone is not easy to repair at all.
As per the details shared folks at iFixit, “mercifully thin, but strong” adhesive holds the back panel with the rest of the phone. The back panel of the phone also contain a wireless charging coil and an NFC coil, which are attatched via a sheet of adhesive. This system is connected to the charging circuitry using repair-friendly spring contacts.
Underneath the battery, which is a 14.24 Wh cell (3700 mAh at 3.85 V) unlike Pixel 3 XL’s 13.2 Wh cell, is the Active Edge flex cable. The teardown also revealed that the biometric hardware comprising of two Near Infrared (NIR) cameras, a NIR flood emitter and a NIR dot projector sit right next to the 8MP front-facing camera.
Notably, the teardown also gave a glimpse of the famous Soli radar chip, which powers the phone’s Motion Sense technology allowing users to use simple hand gestures to peform actions such as changing a track or rejecting a call and waking up the phone when it senses motion in its vicinity, for the very first time.
“Although radar technology has been in use for a long time and seems simple enough on paper, we’re at a loss as to how Google stuffed the entire system into a tiny featureless rectangle with no moving parts,” iFixit wrote in its teardown.
Underneath all this is a 90Hz display made by Samsung. The report notes that Google has used a “strong perimeter adhesive + screen layers going literally to the edge + giant duct-tape-like adhesive pad,” to keep the screen in place. While this usually a good thing, however, it makes repairing broken screens extremely difficult.
The report also noted that Soli radar chip sits right next to the speaker on the top and the Pixel Neural core is layered under “some dedicated Samsung RAM”. The phone also has a a new Knowles audio processor chip which presumably help it with Google Assistant related on-device processing and the live transcibe functionality.
iFixit gave the Pixel 4 XL an overall repairability score of 4, which is the same as that of the Pixel 3 XL smartphone. “Display repairs continue to be difficult, requiring complete disassembly of the phone,” the report noted adding, “All repairs require access through the stubbornly-glued back panel.”
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