Teardown of Samsung Galaxy S IV Reveals it Costs $236

By: Ali Raza  |   March 20th, 2013   |   News, Smartphones

When BlackBerry Z10 was ripped apart it was reported that the device cost about $154 to produce a single unit of the handset. Now its Samsung Galaxy S IV’s turn to face the music, as a IHS iSuppli teardown revealed that the cost of the brand new smartphone is 15 percent higher than the Galaxy S III owing to an upgraded processor, display, memory and new set of sensors. Besides this, IHS also found out after analysing the information that it costs about $236 to produce a Galaxy S IV unit. However, the firm said that the aforementioned estimates could vary when a physical teardown will take place, but for the time being heftier improvements suggests that it’s quite costly. The HSPA+ edition of the S IV has “16 gigabytes of NAND flash memory and costs $244 in materials plus $8.50 to manufacture,” according to CNET. In contrast to this the LTE edition of the flagship device is slightly cheaper, as it costs about $233.

 

IHS’s senior analyst for cost benchmarking, Vincent Leung stated in a press release that, “Among the upgrades are a larger, full high-definition (HD) display; a beefed-up Samsung processor; and a wealth of new sensors that set a record high for the number of such devices in a smartphone design.”

 

The major increase in the cost of S IV came from the new 1,920×1,080-pixel AMOLED display that is incorporated in both LTE and HSPA+ editions. Therefore, the cost of S IV’s display ($75) is $10 more than that of S III ($65). The analysts of IHS also revealed that S IV is the first mobile phone that has got an AMOLED display which boasts such a high resolution, as it was pretty tough in the past to adjust the pixels into such a display.

 

IHS also made it known that S IV incorporates more sensors than S III, which have given it new features like eye-tracking software, infrared gesture, temperature, humidity sensors and ability to check health stats. Due to the addition of these new sensors the cost of the smartphone has also went up by $16 from $12.70 in the S III. Since Samsung has included its homegrown Exynos 5 Octa in some editions of the S IV, depending on the market, so it has also increased its price, as it “is believed to be” using an eight-core chipset that costs $30, whereas the chipset of S III was not more than $17.50.

 

On the other hand, the Qualcomm Snapdragon 600 processor in US edition of S IV is comparatively cheaper than Exynos 5 Octa, and it costs $20. Overall, Samsung itself manaufactures 63 percent or $149 worth parts of the Galaxy S IV, whereas rest of them are prepared by Broadcom and Intel, according to IHS.

 

Source: CNET