Questioning the Google Pixel 4 XL IP68 rating?
Yesterday, I set up the inflatable pool for my daughter and her friends in our yard. I decided to demonstrate how modern flagship cellphones are “water resistant”, with their IP68 rating by immersing my Pixel 4 XL in water and as you can probably guess from the title of this blog, did not go well.
I immersed my Pixel just 2 inches under water for 5 seconds and the first sign of trouble was bubbles coming from the phone, so I immediately pulled it out of the water. Initially, it seemed to be fine, it woke up and functioned as expected, but after a few minutes, it powered off, despite having over 90% charge.
I left it turned off for a few hours before trying to power it on, and a green screen came up with a battery symbol that had a question mark inside it. I did some Googling and found out this means a dead battery, or there is a problem with the connection to the battery, which was a problem with early Pixel 4’s.
I tried shaking the phone to get any water out and a fair bit of water did come out, and left the phone in the garage, which was pretty warm being a 90°F day, for a couple more hours, and tried to power it on once more, and nothing, it was completely dead. So I put it on charge and after a short while, it showed the green screen with battery and question mark again, never attempting to boot into Android.
As I write this on Sunday afternoon, the Pixel 4 XL refuses to power on, whether plugged into the charger or not, no green screen with question mark battery, literally no response at all, so I can only assume that water did ingress inside the device and killed the battery as it was powered on at the time of immersion.
So, this is problematic as I use my phone for two-factor authentication for many online services. My understanding of 2FA is that the code generator is directly linked to the phone it’s on. So I am freaking out as I have work resources linked to the Pixel 4 XL and I might not be able to log into those resources.
I am not a big phone user, most of the time it sits idle, but not having it made me realize how much I relied on it for many things I do, including mission-critical work things. This meant that I had to purchase a new phone, I was looking at buying a new phone relatively soon, possibly waiting for the Pixel 8. I obviously need a phone, so I opted for the Pixel 7 Pro, I bought the Pro, as the telephoto lens is a must-have for me, if the regular Pro had regular wide and telephone, I’d have bought that and saved $200.
In regard to 2FA, I did disable 2FA on a couple of services as I was still logged in and managed to recover my Amazon account by sending Amazon a scan of my driver’s license. Other services were not so easy to recover. To my surprise, when I downloaded and installed Google Authenticator on my new Pixel 7 Pro, all my 2FA accounts were there, so it seems that these rolling codes are not linked to a specific device. So I had to delete and reenroll the accounts I had reset, which was not a major chore, but it was unnecessary.
But I am left with the question of whether Google lied about the IP68 rating of the Pixel 4 XL? The IP68 rating that Google claims the Pixel 4 XL has, according to the spec is that it can be immersed in water to at least 1 meter (3.28ft) deep for 30 minutes. Clearly, this was not the case with the Pixel 4 XL, was my Pixel defective, or does the Pixel 4 XL not meet the standard as advertised? either way, it’s very annoying.