Edible Apple

Wasting no time at all, the resourceful folks at iFixit already got their hands on the iPhone 4 and tore that sucker apart.

Some notes of interest from their teardown.

The battery is huge, as expected, but unlike its predecessors, it’s not soldered to the logic board. Regarding the integrated antenna’s into the steel frame, iFixit writes:

Apple has gone a step further and tuned the phone to utilize whichever network band is less congested or has the least interference for the best signal quality, regardless of the actual signal strength. Early reports suggest this feature, while buggy in its early stages, will greatly improve the phone’s reliability on AT&T’s fragile network.

This echoes what David Pogue wrote in his iPhone 4 review.

And we certainly can’t leave this part out, if only for the name.

The front glass panel of the iPhone is constructed of Corning Gorilla Glass, a chemically strengthened alkali-aluminosilicate thin sheet glass that is reported to be 20 times stiffer and 30 times harder than plastic.

Gorilla Glass holds many advantages as the iPhone 4’s front panel including its high resistance to wear and increased strength from a strengthening process.

And for all you audiophiles out there:

Apple is following in the footsteps of the Nexus One by using dual microphones to help improve audio quality and suppress background noise.

Interestingly, the two microphones are positioned at the two far ends of the phone. The microphone at the top of the iPhone is most likely utilized for capturing background noise to be analyzed by internal circuitry and used to cancel any noise put into the main microphone other than the user’s voice.

An improved audio chamber aids in clarifying sounds leaving the iPhone including calls via speakerphone as well as music played through the internal speaker.

And just to show you the lengths that iFixit will go to in order to provide these internal iPhone shots to the public as soon as possible, here’s an email they sent out yesterday evening.

We went to extreme lengths to acquire the iPhone 4. Kyle flew to Japan, expecting to take advantage of the 16-hour time difference. He had his camping gear all ready to wait in line outside the Ginza Apple Store tonight.But then, in a last-minute twist that should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with the ongoing iPhone 4 release drama, FedEx delivered some iPhone 4 units to customers two days early.

One of those customers, an engineer at a Silicon Valley startup, provided us his phone. And we are taking it apart.