Droid Incredible costs $165.35 to make

It’s always amusing to see how much a phone costs to make, what it costs to buy with no contract, and what it costs with a contract. In the Droid Incredible’s case, those numbers are $165.35 / $599 / $149. So if you had the assembly and manufacturing skills of one of Santa’s elves, you could buy all the necessary parts for the Droid Incredible and put it together yourself for quite the bargain. Sadly, I’m going to assume that you’re like me and lack said elf-skills and thus must just buy the entire phone. Anyway, here’s a breakdown of the parts and their associated costs. (click this image for full-size)

Yes these parts are relatively cheap. But you can’t forget all the man-hours that went into designing these parts and making the machines that actually produce them.

And here’s the Press Release issued by iSuppli:

“The Droid Incredible could have been dubbed the ‘Nexus Two’ given its similarity to HTC’s Nexus One introduced early this year,” observed Andrew Rassweiler, director and principal analyst and teardown services manager for iSuppli. “Indeed, the phones are very similar in terms of costs and features, with the main difference being the Incredible’s support for the CDMA air standard used by carrier Verizon in the United States.”

The Nexus One’s BOM amounted to $174.15, based on iSuppli’s January pricing estimate, very close to the current materials cost for the Incredible. The centerpiece of both phones is an advanced Active Matrix Organic Light Emitting Diode (AMOLED) display. Both phones also share a common electronic design based on Qualcomm Inc.’s 1GHz Snapdragon baseband processor. Finally, the Incredible and Nexus One both integrate a class-leading density, at 4Gbit, of Mobile Double Data Rate (DDR) DRAM to support the processor.

Beyond the use of CDMA in the Incredible, only a few other differences distinguish the phone from the Nexus One. The Incredible, for one, uses an optical track pad, as opposed to the trackball on the Nexus One. Furthermore, the Incredible employs HTC’s Sense User Interface (UI) overlay, whereas the Nexus uses the generic Android UI.

When the $8.90 manufacturing cost is added in, the combined BOM and production expense for the Incredible amounts to $172.25.

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