Hardware costs don't cover purchase price
Google is selling its Nexus One smartphone at a near loss, according to a report from analyst firm iSuppli.
Hardware costs for the the Nexus One amount to $174.15 (£108.18), despite being sold for $179 (£111) at present, including a contract with T-Mobile. The estimate does not include marketing, retail and, crucially, software costs.
"With the Nexus One, Google has taken the most advanced features seen in recent smartphone designs and wrapped them up into a single sleek design," said Kevin Keller, senior analyst for competitive analysis at iSuppli.
"Items like the durable unibody construction, the blazingly fast Snapdragon baseband processor and the bright and sharp active matrix organic light emitting diode display have all been seen in previous phones, but never before combined into a single design.
"This gives the Nexus One the most advanced features of any smartphone ever dissected by iSuppli's Teardown Analysis Service, a remarkable feat given that the product's bill of materials is similar to comparable products introduced during the past year."
The most expensive single component in the handset is the 1GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor, which the report praised for its speed.
"The Snapdragon was first noted in a previous smartphone torn down by iSuppli, the Toshiba TGO1, which is based on Microsoft's Windows Mobile operating system," Keller said.
"However, the Android 2.1 operating system used in the Nexus One better capitalises on the Snapdragon's fast performance, making the user interface and applications run very quickly."
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Their comment:-
Android is so much better than Microsoft's Windows Mobile
Android 2.1, the software that runs Google's Nexus One phone, is highly optimized to run on the Snapdragon processor, as you can see by how fast the Nexus One phone runs.
You will see similar fast performance on other Android 2.1 phones that run on the same Snapdragon processor.
It makes a good contrast to Microsoft's ancient Windows Mobile phone operating system, which hasn't been optimized at all. The kernel (core) of Windows Mobile has not been changed since 2004, and has not been optimized for any modern ARM processor. This is why Windows Mobile phones are more sluggish and unresponsive than Android phones, when they are both running on the the same processor hardware.
Because Windows Mobile is so old, I would avoid it, and instead use more modern operating systems like Android, iPhone or Palm's webOS, all of which take advantage of modern hardware.
