"LG completely blew us away with the technology that they brought to us."

When I ask Patrick Brady — who runs the engineering team that helps Android partner with manufacturers — how the company landed on LG for the phone, he was effusive about their hardware prowess. It was something I'm not used to hearing about the Korean company, which has released a handful of disappointing phones in the US recently. "We really liked what LG was doing with a couple different technologies, specifically around inductive charging, and some of their display technologies," Brady told me. "The devices we saw them bringing out were really top notch and looked like a great hardware platform for us to showcase the next version of Android." Duarte agrees. "Working with LG was pretty awesome because they completely blew us away with the technology that they brought to us."

Alongside the new phone, Matias gleefully shows me a new inductive charging dock, a quarter-sphere that magnetizes the phone in place while juicing. If it looks and acts like the Touchstone dock that Palm released with its ill-fated Pre, no one should be surprised. Duarte was, after all, one of the masterminds behind webOS and its related devices.

Unfortunately for Google, the Nexus 4's most defining technological feature — at least for the moment — may be more about what it doesn't have than what it does. That is, it lacks LTE, which here in the US makes it a step behind other phones in its class. How can this be a rival to the iPhone 5 when it's using last generation's networks? It's a complicated issue which Rubin was eager to talk about.

"We certainly have a desire to offer devices on every carrier on the planet," he told me. "The tactical issue is GSM vs. LTE. A lot of the networks that have deployed LTE haven't scaled completely yet — they're hybrid networks. They'll do their old thing and they'll do LTE, which means the devices need both radios built into them."

"We want to make sure the devices are available for every network on the planet."

But there's more. It's not just a technical issue for Google. I can hear it in the way Rubin talks about the landscape of the wireless industry.

"For now we're gonna sit back and watch those networks evolve. Two radios in a device right now certainly raises the cost, and diminishes battery life." This point seems to frustrate him. "When we did the Galaxy Nexus with LTE we had to do just that, and it just wasn't a great user experience. It's possible to do it right, but that's not where we'll put our resources initially. Tactically, we want to make sure the devices are available for every network on the planet."

The sentiment makes some sense. The global subscriber base of LTE users is still tiny, even with a massive uptick in the US over the past year.

In other words, the economics are bad for Google. The company is selling an unlocked version of the phone with T-Mobile on contract, but my sense is that they're reluctant to work with other carriers that ask for more control over devices. That may be because Google's experience with Verizon and the Galaxy Nexus has clearly not been ideal — the carrier's restrictions have made it hard for the company to keep the phone updated with the latest software. I personally know a lot of unhappy Galaxy Nexus owners who've had to sit on the sidelines for months at a time while their HSPA+ brethren see devices updated on Google's schedule.

It's not obvious whether I'm seeing politics at play, or something bigger and deeper. Something more core to what Google wants to be as a company.