(Image courtesy of AppleInsider and iFixit)

What a crazy couple of weeks it’s been for the iPhone 4. No sooner has the device been officially announced by Apple, but would-be owners trip over themselves (and AT&T’s servers) to be the first to pre-order, only to have a few handsets arrive a couple of days early. One of those has fallen into the hands of iFixit, who has completed an early teardown of America’s new mobile darling.

AppleInsider is reporting that the iFixit team is among the first to get their hands on an iPhone 4 on Tuesday, even earlier than Apple stated for online pre-order customers thanks to a FedEx snafu. Even though Steve Jobs showed off a bit of the iPhone 4’s internal components in some keynote slides at WWDC 2010, the more obsessive-compulsive among us are always ready to indulge in a more thorough examination of a new device’s guts.

The teardown discovered that the two exposed Phillips screws at the base of the handset now release the back panel rather than the front glass, which iFixit claims will make “replacing the rear panel trivial, but unfortunately means that replacing the front glass will likely be challenging.”

As you can see from the image above, the new, larger 3.7V 1420 mAh Li-Polymer battery indeed takes up the majority of the limited space inside the iPhone 4, as Jobs promised during the keynote announcement. The logic board features Apple’s custom A4 processor as well as “a new three-axis gyroscope that we believe is designed and manufactured by STMicro and not yet commercially available.”

Oh, and talk about dedicated: One of the iFixit team had actually flown to Japan with a tent, ready to camp out in front of the Ginza Apple Store in order to procure one of the first available handsets. Thanks to the FedEx glitch, it wasn’t necessary after all.

The iFixit team has posted a number of early teardown photos and promises more details to come soon.

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