T-Mobile G1 costs only £92 to make

T-Mobile G1
T-Mobile G1 - how much do the components cost?

T-Mobile's G1 handset, manufactured by HTC, has been broken down on a cost basis, and it turns out it comes in at a wallet friendly £92.

Analyst firm iSuppli has done the donkey work on this one and worked out the cost of all the parts on the handset, and has found it's pretty comparable to other handsets on the market.

For instance, the recently launched BlackBerry Bold comes in at around £105 per handset, so to make one of the hottest phones of the year for less is no mean feat.

Break it down

The breakdown is as follows:

The baseband, which contains the processor and modem functions, costs around £18. The 3.2-inch touchscreen display is next up at about £13, and after that the 3MP camera with autofocus represents the next most expensive segment at around £8.

Finally, we see the Radio Frequency (RF)/Power Amplifier (PA) portion, which provides the super-fast HSDPA connection, costing about £6.

Overall, it seems like HTC haven't skimped too much on the components, and given the license-free (ish) aspect of the Android OS, we have to wonder why the phone only comes on such an expensive tariff.

But this is the first Android phone, and the research and development costs haven't been brought into this virtual breakdown, so let's just give T-Mobile the benefit of the doubt for now.

Gareth Beavis
Formerly Global Editor in Chief

Gareth has been part of the consumer technology world in a career spanning three decades. He started life as a staff writer on the fledgling TechRadar, and has grew with the site (primarily as phones, tablets and wearables editor) until becoming Global Editor in Chief in 2018. Gareth has written over 4,000 articles for TechRadar, has contributed expert insight to a number of other publications, chaired panels on zeitgeist technologies, presented at the Gadget Show Live as well as representing the brand on TV and radio for multiple channels including Sky, BBC, ITV and Al-Jazeera. Passionate about fitness, he can bore anyone rigid about stress management, sleep tracking, heart rate variance as well as bemoaning something about the latest iPhone, Galaxy or OLED TV.