The main problem I have with this besides everything already said is that price tag, no way are they gonna sell at cost for $20.
Lets do a run down of the cost of parts (we'll assume actual assembly is free
). Now when actually making commercial electronics, it's better to buy in bulk, it's an inverse here making less units does not mean you're spending less as the cost of each component goes up. Most component manufacturers tend to work by the thousand.
A 400MHz ARM processor
This is a total guessitmate based on the fact that you can grab a single 1GHz ARM SoC with dedicated GPU (PowerVR) for $40 (and that's for 1!), I'll say it'll probably cost ya about
$8,000 for 1k (or $8 for 1) 400MHz ARM SoCs.
16MB of RAM
While RAM is dirt cheap there's 2 ways this can go. They use SRAM or DRAM, it really comes down to trade offs, SRAM use less power but you can't really get the density you see in DRAM. Or you can get nice big piles of RAM at the cost of battery life.
If you went for 16MB of
SRAM you'd have to spend about
$34,000 for 1k units (and that's with bulk buy discount).
With
DRAM it'd cost ya
$4,940 for 1k units (at $4.94 a pop).
WiFi module
Okay this one will put you over $20 on it's own. A
decent wifi module (by decent I mean it operates at 2.4GHz and can at least support 802.11b) will usually run around $26 (if you were buying the one); for a 1k reel you might get the cost per module down to around $18 and change (guesstimate). So that'll be around the
$18,000 mark.
Built in rechargeable battery pack
For something like this, you're gonna want 1200mAh minimum (that's like 9 AA batteries, which makes using AA totally out of the question). An off the shelf pack will cost (when buying 1k of em) around $13-$15, so anywhere from
$13,000 to $15,000. Of course off the shelf may not be an option if it's too big, if that happens you'll have to shell out more for a moulded pack (custom cost money!) and it'll probably be Lithium polymer which is kinda pricey but gives great performance (it has excellent charge/discharge characteristics).
Screen
Lets just say
not cheap unless you know where to score a shit ton of out of production screens from 5 years ago. Which is a bad idea since they'd be out of production (so you're stuck with what you got pretty much). When you're doing this kinda stuff you need to know that in a few years those components you've used will still be around and are in active production.
Built in persistent memory
They say it'll have 2GB for the base model (copying apple much), you stick 2GB in that and you're stepping over the price line on purpose. Seriously, they should just stick an SD card slot or two on it (it would work out cheaper - see below).
Okay, 2GB of flash memory will cost about
$20,280 for 1k (meaning 1 will cost $20.28). Over $20 on memory alone and it only gets steeper if you're gonna have more memory in different models (seriously, it wasn't cool when Apple did it).
On the other hand if you just stuck an sd card slot on it, it would cost
$2,400 (not for the connector but the right to do it). See you need to be part of the SD association or something to make SD host products. It costs $2,400 annually. The connectors would be
$1,200 for 1k ($1.20 for 1).
PCB
This is kinda hard to say since the price varies by fabrication house, but chances are it'll be either a 4 or 8 layer PCB (really depends how good they are at laying tracks). The more layers you add the more the price goes up.
So working of that limited picture (I'm not covering things like caps and resistors since their cost is minuet) an nD (base unit) will cost ya $92.28 (with SRAM) or $65.22 (with DRAM) on the low end if they make em in 1k batches.
With that, I call bullshit on the nD's price tag...
P.S. I wrote this up cause I was really bored.
