FCC documents reveal the Pixel 9’s smart home superpower

Are you ready for the Pixel 9? Google has teased its plans to launch the next wave of its smartphone lineup on August 13, 2024, and with just a month to go before the big event, it’s no surprise that we’re starting to see the final deals come together. We started the week doing just that, looking at the FCC filings of the Pixel Watch 3. Now it’s time for the phones themselves to follow suit, also confirming some exciting news about their wireless connectivity.

Today, the FCC shared regulatory documents filed by Google detailing radio emission tests for several new phones — clearly, the Pixel 9. And just as we’re expecting four different models — the Pixel 9, Pixel 9 Pro, Pixel 9 Pro XL and Pixel 9 Pro Fold — we’re revealing listings for a whole bunch of ID numbers.

The problem, at least for now, is that the FCC’s dreaded website is throwing up error messages when trying to access anything of interest, interfering with a deeper dive. On FCCID.io, which scrapes FCC data and presents it in a way that’s a little easier to navigate, we can see four new entries today for Google smartphones: A4RGZC4K, A4RGR83Y, A4RGGX8B and A4RGGH2X. them, 9 to 5 Googlewho first noticed these files, adds A4RGEC77.

There’s rarely much useful information in the kind of FCC filings we see at this stage—perhaps the best you can hope for is some physical measurements of the hardware—but every once in a while, some interesting connection details are revealed through the bandwagon. of supported radios. Luckily, there’s just one such piece here, and in addition to the expected stuff like 5G, UWB, Wi-Fi 6E, NFC, and Bluetooth, at least some of this hardware will support Thread, the mesh protocol used by the Materia.

We’ve been anticipating the arrival of Android phones that can communicate with smart home devices like this, given that we were the first to reveal Android 15 adding support for Threaded phones. That just left the question of which hardware might come first — and we shouldn’t be at all surprised to see it here, finally on a Pixel.

With the FCC website seemingly down for an early weekend, we’ll keep looking in hopes of turning up some useful documents, but it could be a long process. We may yet discover more FCC IDs of the Pixel 9. As we begin to get a better account of them and perhaps have a little more luck with the FCC forms, we’ll hopefully have a better picture of whether Thread support will be available across the entire Pixel 9 line, or limited to some of the higher-end options.