FCC docs reveal the Pixel 9's smart home superpower

Are you ready for the Pixel 9? Google’s been teasing its plans to launch the next wave of its own smartphone lineup on August 13, 2024, and with just one month to go before the big event, it’s little surprise that we’re starting to see final arrangements coming together. We started out the week doing just that, looking at the Pixel Watch 3’s FCC paperwork. Now it’s time for the phones themselves to follow suit, while also confirming some exciting news about their wireless connectivity.

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

The problem, right now at least, is that the FCC’s cantankerous website is throwing up error messages when trying to access anything of interest, interfering with a deeper dive. Over at FCCID.io, which scrapes FCC data and presents it in a way that’s a bit easier to navigate, we can see four new entries today for Google smartphones: A4RGZC4K, A4RGR83Y, A4RGGX8B, and A4RGGH2X. To those, 9to5Google, which first noticed these filings, adds A4RGEC77.

There’s rarely a ton of useful information in the sort of FCC paperwork we see at this stage — maybe the best you might hope for are some physical measurements of the hardware — but once in a while, some interesting connectivity details are revealed by way of the radio bands supported. As luck would have it, there’s just such a nugget here, and in addition to expected stuff like 5G, UWB, Wi-Fi 6E, NFC, and Bluetooth, at least some of this hardware is going to support Thread, the mesh protocol used by Matter.

We’ve been anticipating the arrival of Android phones that could communicate with smart home devices like this, considering we were the first to spot Android 15 adding support for phones with Thread. That just left the question of what hardware might be first — and we should not be at all surprised to see it here, on a Pixel finally.

With the FCC’s website seemingly checked out for an early weekend, we’ll keep poking away in the hopes of getting it to return some useful docs, but this could be a long process. We may well be discovering even more Pixel 9 FCC IDs yet. As we start getting a better account of those, and maybe having a little more luck with FCC forms, hopefully we’ll get a better picture of whether Thread support will be available all across the Pixel 9 lineup, or limited to some of the higher-end options.