iFixit

Luckily, the plastic chassis holding the motherboard in place is held by nothing more than a handful of screws -- no more of that adhesive funny business.

• This plastic frame also houses the headphone jack, speaker, and LED flash.

With the rear chassis removed, we are free to begin taking out the motherboard.

Our spudger makes quick history of the connectors holding the motherboard in place, and off it comes.

Unlike last year's Droid, the Droid 4's keyboard pressure sensors are attached to the back of the motherboard.

• Cool! The keyboard letters are printed on raised rubber atop the pressure contacts. Our guess is as good as yours as to why Motorola chose to go that route—there's no benefit we can see from having the letters printed on the rubber.

Calling upon the help of our little friend, the plastic opening tool, we remove the rear-facing camera.

Like last year's Droid RAZR—and what seems to be the standard-issue in smartphones nowadays—the Droid 4 sports an 8 MP camera with 1080P video recording capabilities up to 30 frames per second.

The back of the camera sports a cryptic code: 84014789. We can tell you with confidence that this is a Revision A camera unit, as opposed to any other letter.

The side of the camera (not shown) reads SA2539 1XH00 0101650 7001 SH.

Interesting: The microSD card slot is not soldered onto the motherboard, but instead held in place by two screws.

The slot connects to the motherboard via some pressure-sensitive pins, as well as a rectangular multi-pin connector.

Peeling back the rubber keyboard to reveal the keypad contacts.

Motorola definitely understood the importance of designing a good keyboard for this phone. From our limited txt-testing, it appears to be the best Droid keyboard yet. The same shows in its internal construction.

Time for our favorite part, chip identification!

• Samsung K3PE7E00M-XGC1 8 Gb LPDDR2.
• Hynix H8BCS0QG0MMR memory MCP containing Hynix DRAM and STM flash
• Qualcomm MDM6600 supporting HSPA+ speeds of up to 14.4 Mbps
• The Qualcomm PM8028 chip works in conjunction with the Qualcomm MDM6600 to provide wireless data connection to the phone.
• Motorola T6VP0XBG-0001 LCM 2.0 LTE baseband processor.
• ZE55431140KHD, which appears to be the RAM sitting atop the main processor.

  • How do we know the processor is lurking beneath? Check out the chip package-on-package goodness in the second image. The processor is the orange chip beneath the RAM.

Infineon 5726 SLU A1.

Skyworks 77483 700MHz LTE PA module.

Avago ACPM-7868 quad-band power amplifier.

Texas Instruments WL 1285C WiLink 7.0 single-chip WLAN, GPS, Bluetooth and FM solution

ST Ericsson CPCAP 6556002 System on a Chip

5100 1582005 19A35DW

The back of the board is largely devoid of chips, save for one:

• The same SanDisk SDIN5C1-16G flash memory that we found in the updated Droid Razr also graces the interior of the Droid 4.

As its name suggests, this package provides the 16 GB of memory that comes with every Droid 4.