WIRELESS AND MOBILE NEWS

The well reviewed and heavily promooed Droid by Motorola materials cost $187.75, reports iSuppi which contians $179.11 worth of components and $8.64 to manufacture, not including software and materials.

Droid does offer more features than the iPhone such as a QWERTY keyboard,  5 megapixel camera, microSD(highest cost) and removable battery.

Verizon is still heavily promoting the Droid by offering a free Droid Eris, if you buy a Droid by Motorola or a Droid Eris. You also don't have to wait for a rebate if you use the Wireless and Mobile News' coupon-link  Instant Phone Rebate Only Available with Online Purchase. Starting January 18, Verizon's new cheaper unlimited plans go into effect.

The price gives the Droid a component cost similar to other comparable smartphones introduced during the past year, including Apple Inc.'s iPhone 3GS and Google's Nexus One ($174.15).

Disassembling the Droid A major differentiating feature between the Droid and the iPhone is the inclusion of a microSD slot for adding additional NAND flash memory to store user data and content, such as apps and video and audio files. The Droid comes bundled with a removable microSD card that contains 16Gbytes of NAND flash memory, the same density embedded inside the high-end model of the iPhone 3G S. At $35, the microSD card is the Droid's most expensive single component.

Looking inside the Droid, the device features a 3.7-inch TFT LCD display with 16 million colors and a resolution of 854 by 480 pixels. At $17.75, this display is the most expensive component integrated within the enclosure of the Droid. The capacitive touch screen/overlay is also a noteworthy component that supports the Droid touchscreen interface, with a cost of $17.50.

The camera module appears to be sporting a new type of auto-focus actuation technology that iSuppli's Teardown Analysis Service has not previously seen, and still has not yet been identified. iSuppli hypothesizes that this may be bimetallic strips that are heat actuated. In contrast, most auto-focus camera modules at this scale feature voice-coil actuation.

The Droid module features a 5-megapixel CMOS sensor, and the whole module is priced at $14.25. The core semiconductor in the Droid is the $14.04 baseband processor/radio frequency chip supplied by Qualcomm Inc. The chip supports the CDMA2000 1x and EV-DO air standards, the Global Positioning System (GPS) and tri-band 800MHz/1900MHz/AWS(1700/2100MHz) frequencies.

Texas Instruments Inc. is the supplier of the Droid's applications processor, priced at $12.90, as well as the Bluetooth/WLAN/FM transmitter and receiver, at $6.50. Beyond the top cost drivers, one other interesting item in the Droid is the use of two silicon microphones from Knowles, presumably to provide noise cancellation, although no dedicated audio codec was found to support this feature.