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Comment by _cbsz | Hacker News Reader

Why are phones so bloody expensive? The iPod Touch can be had for $200ish, so why does adding the "phone part" double the cost? (full disclosure: I'm on the iPod Touch curmudgeon phone plan -- I pay Skype $3/mo for outgoing calls and insist that incoming callers leave voicemail, which is emailed to me through Google Voice.)

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http://www.isuppli.com/News/Pages/iPhone-3G-S-Carries-178-96...

There are enough questions about where their numbers come from that it would be advised to think before using them as any more than a guide to some costs involved.

http://daringfireball.net/linked/2009/04/13/isuppli-shuffle http://daringfireball.net/2007/07/isuppli

Others already mentioned the camera, GPS, multiband radio (RF).

There are also much more difficult issues of heat dissipation and power consumption.

Finally, you have to pay for tons of patents used in every phone. I guess Google does not have a good cross licensing contracts with Qualcomm/Nokia/others since it probably does not own any essential patent in this area.

You also pay for tons of interoperability testing Google has to run.

Wow, no wonder there aren't any startups making phones... the closest is openmoko which was part of a much larger entity.

My phone's got more processing power and more memory than the laptop I bought 5 years ago. It also has a GPS, camera, accelerometer, voice recognition, and cellular connection. And it fits in my pocket.

The laptop cost $1600 when I bought it. Why are we complaining about a $500ish phone?

Because some handwavy analogue to Moore's Law says that said laptop ought to cost about $400 now (and in fact it's hard to justify blowing $1k on a laptop). Have you priced something equivalent (compute-wise, screens are still expensive) lately?

Given a choice between a $400 laptop and a $500 phone, I think the phone is significantly more useful. You can't shove a laptop into a pocket. You generally can't talk to a laptop and have it understand what you're saying. It's rather inconvenient to take pictures with your laptop. Your laptop doesn't have a GPS, and even if it did you can't fit it on the dashboard of your car. You get cellular service in many more areas than you can find open wireless networks.

If I could code conveniently on my phone, I wouldn't use my laptop for anything. I've switched over to my phone as my primary web browser, e-mail client, music player, thumb drive, GPS, atlas, address book, camera, and game machine.

Laptops can be purchased with integrated 3G/WiMax now. Laptops can run the exact same software as phones, too. (Fire up Android in VirtualBox.)

I find phones nice for their niche (almost-computer when you aren't near a computer), but if I was sitting next to a laptop and a phone, I would only use the phone for phone calls.

The point of the phone is that you're likely to be sitting next to the phone far more often than you're likely to be sitting next to the laptop.

But a laptop that's much more powerful is about $250 these days. That's why people are complaining.

(But, to be fair, capacitative touch screens and 3G modems are not cheap parts.)

Often people (I, at least) don't care what it costs to make a product, but rather care what value it provides. I'd take a free phone (duh), would probably take a chance at $399, but flirting with $550 is beyond the pain point for me. I suppose there are several other people who feel the same way.

I'm especially annoyed that this piece of hardware appears to have a AT&T compatible 3G chipset but is disallowed in the baseband. To me this is just another piece-of-crap restricted-use telco-friendly piece of hardware, this time with Google livery. To pay for an unsubsidized phone and not get all of the features that the hardware is clearly capable of (modulo patents: multitouch) is offensive, and makes the $550 to me even more irritating.

The whole thing is slightly less appalling when you think of the phone as another iteration of the G1 and MyTouch for T-Mo and not as an honest attempt by Google at offering an open device.

It's not the "phone part", it's the size. They're packing a phone, various hardware components, a CPU, storage, a bright screen, and a battery to power the whole thing into a tiny package. I'm surprised it's only $529 unsubsidized.

Well there's the phone part. The GPS. The camera. It costs $99 subsidized, and if I'm not mistaken you can get out of a contract for $200, so that's $300 right?

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