Tuesday, 19 March 2013

IHS speculates the Samsung Galaxy S4 costs a fair bit more to make than its predecessor!


   Have you ever wondered how much it really costs Samsung to build their flagship smartphones? Thankfully IHS have published their predicted costs from a teardown of the device and here's where all the extra money goes!

Display:
The Galaxy S4's full HD AMOLED display was the most expensive component in the phone, which they think costs $75 compared to $65 for the 720p display on the Galaxy S3. IHS said that, “Reaching a true pixel density greater than 300 ppi has been a challenge for AMOLED display makers. However, Samsung was able to enhance AMOLED display performance by implementing new technologies that also drove up the cost of the display.”

Processor:
IHS believe that Samsung's Exynos 5 Octa eight-core chip, made with their 28-nanometer process, costs $30, which is considerably more than the $17.50 cost of the Galaxy S3's quad-core!

Sensors:
The S4 has a tonne of added sensors compared to its predecessor. There's now humidity, temperature and IR gesture sensors so at a probable cost of $16 that's nearly $4 more than the S3's sensors cost!

LTE:
Samsung's choice to go with the Qualcomm Snapdragon 600 for the LTE version of the Galaxy S4 means that there's support for six LTE networks around the world, but you have to pay for that sort of connectivity and IHS think it's about $25. That's $9 more than the HSPA+ connections on the Galaxy S3.

    That means that for the 16GB Galaxy S4 looks likely to cost in the region of $244 to produce all in all. That mean that for a HSPA+ Galaxy S4 is it costs Samsung $30.40 more than for the equivalent version of the Galaxy S III, that's 15% more and that's why we've seen rumoured prices for the Galaxy S4 pushing that of baseline iPhone 5's!

   If there's anything else you wanted to know about the origin of the components of the Galaxy S4 then check out IHS' full report here!
Via ZDNet.

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