Motorola’s Droid more expensive to make than iPhone and Nexus One

19th January, 2010 by Adina
Tags: Droid, iPhone, Mobiles, Motorola, Nexus One, Phines

Some cost analysis reveals that the Motorola Droid is one of the most costly smartphones to produce among the latest devices currently available on the market. The materials cost for the Android handset is $179.11 and the assembly cost is $8.64, with a total of $187.75. Compared to the 16GB iPhone 3GS costs $178.96 and another Android device, the Nexus One is $174.14, the Droid is costlier.

A part of the supplementary cost for Motorola’s Droid is determined by the attempt to avoid some problems of the iPhone. The most expensive component in the Droid is the $35 16GB microSDHC card, according to the analysts’ estimation, as Motorola decided to use removable instead of embedded memory. Another relatively expensive part of the phone is the 3.7-inch LCD providing an 854×480-pixel resolution. Its cost is $17.75 and the price of the capacitive touch surface is $17.25. The complete display is the most expensive built-in component.

There are also other parts somehow unique, which contribute to the higher price of the device. The $14.25 camera, for example, is a 5-megapixel unit with flash, but may also use an auto focusing system activated by heat, a rather unusual feature for this category. The CDMA/EVDO chipset form Qualcomm, which costs $14.04, supports Verizon’s bands but also the 1,700MHz AWS band, which is used by small carriers CDMA-based, like Cricket.

Other components contribute to the total price as follows: the 550MHz TI OMAP processor is $12.90, the 750MB of built-in flash memory is $9.20, the TI Bluetooth/Wi-Fi chipset costs $6.50, 192MB of flash memory from Numonyx cost $4.90 and the price of the lithium-ion battery is $4.25. The contribution of the sliding QWERTY keyboard to the total price is not mentioned.

The costs may be somehow surprising as the Nexus One from HTC, for example, uses more higher-end components, a 1GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor and an AMOLED display with a similar resolution being among them. The 4GB microSD card, however, helps to balance the price, thanks to its reduced cost.

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