It was inevitable that someone would get their hands on the new Samsung Galaxy S 4 and rip the device to shreds. We all know that when a new high-end device hits the market, the teardowns are coming. The first tear down of the Galaxy S 4 that we’ve seen comes from IHS.
The company has torn the smartphone apart and offered up an estimate of how much it costs Samsung to construct the smartphone. The company estimates that it costs Samsung about $237 per 32 GB Galaxy S 4 to build the new high-end smartphone. That bill of materials is higher than competing devices on the market according to IHS.
IHS estimates that the 16 GB iPhone 5 costs Apple about $205 to build. Another interesting thing that was discovered during the tear down is that Samsung provides many of the internal components of the device through its various subsidiaries. One of the only major parts inside of the device that isn’t Samsung branded, at least for the US version, is the processor.
The US version of the phone uses a QUALCOMM Snapdragon processor. The version of the device sold in Korea and other parts of the world uses Samsung’s own octo Exynos 4 processor. Since the US version uses a different processor, it also has an image processing chip from Fujitsu that the Korean version lacks. In the Korean version the Samsung processor handles some of the image processing duties negating the need for that Fujitsu image processor.
[via SlashGear]
