Those crafty folks over at iFixit love opening up all the latest and greatest devices and laying their internals bare, and they have now done so with the Nexus 4, Google’s latest Nexus smartphone, and there was something very interesting they found inside.
It turns out that despite the lack of LTE support, the Nexus 4’s motherboard has a Qualcomm WTR1605L seven-band 4G LTE chip embedded on it, though it is not sure if it can be made to work as there might not be an 4G antenna included, but it does give us hopes of a 4G-enabled Nexus 4 some time next year, just like we saw Google releasing a 3G Nexus 7 a few months after its initial Wi-Fi-only model.
In terms of the actual tear down, here is what iFixit found. The shiny back plate that holds the non-removable battery in place was found to have pressure contacts for powering the NFC antenna as well as the wireless charging induction coil, though the battery was found a bit hard to remove due to the use of adhesive to keep it in place on the back of the phone. Oh, and LG also decided to screw in the battery, as the adhesive probably wasn’t enough to keep everything together.
The motherboard itself was easy to remove though, but due to the messy battery removal procedure and also the glass front being fused to the display, iFixit gave the Nexus 4 a repairability score of 7/10. So while the Nexus 10 was found to be quite easy to take apart, the Nexus 4 is probably going to be a bit more problematic to open up, though not that hard to make it a tough device to repair.
Hit the source link below to take a look at the Nexus 4’s internals and full details on the tear down.
