Nexus 4 Tear Down, Unveils Replaceable Battery, Other Goodies

This week, Google’s Nexus 4 smartphone, made by LG, has popped up on Google Play as available for purchase, and disappeared almost instantly, as stock was low and demand was high.

However, some people did manage to order it, and they have already started to receive their units and take them for a spin. The new Nexus device, the first in the world to arrive on shelves with the Android 4.2 Jelly Bean operating system on board, also landed in the hands of people behind iFixit, who took their time to tear it down to pieces. They discovered that the handset’s 3.8 V, 2100 mAh battery can be replaced, though not as easily as a Galaxy Nexus owner would be able to do it on their device, and that the back cover was not put there only to protect the battery. Nexus 4 comes to the market with an 8-megapixel rear-facing camera labeled AC2AD D5A261, as well as with a 1.3MP front camera labeled Y411A.

It also sports Toshiba THGBM5G6A2JBA1R 8GB Flash memory, a Qualcomm WTR1605L Seven-Band 4G LTE chip, Invensense MPU-6050 Six-Axis (Gyro + Accelerometer), and SlimPort ANX7808 SlimPort Transmitter (HDMI output converter). The Nexus 4 motherboard also packs Avago ACPM-7251 Quad-Band GSM/EDGE and Dual-Band UMTS Power Amplifier and Avago 3012 Ultra Low-Noise GNSS Front-End Module on its front. On the back, it sports the Snapdragon S4 Pro 1.5 GHz CPU and Samsung K3PE0E00A 2GB RAM, Qualcomm MDM9215M 4G GSM/CDMA modem, PM8921 Power Management, and WCD9310 audio codec, along with other components.

The new Google phone was also designed with dual ambient light sensors, 3.5mm headphone jack, and micro-USB port. It also sports a micro SIM card slot, but no MicroSD. As for the handset’s screen, it is a 4.7", 1280 x 768, WXGA IPS display manufactured by LG Display, with a Synaptics S7020A touchscreen controller next to it. Users who would like to learn more on the phone’s internals and to have a look at how its hardware components look like should head over to this page on iFixit.

Nexus 4 get torn to pieces
Image credits to iFixit

Posted in: Hardware, Mobile Phone, Review