Google Nexus One costs £107 in parts

The parts to make Google's Nexus One 'superphone' cost the manufacturers $174 (£107) according to analyst iSuppli – although the phone retails at around $529 (£328).

There was a lot of talk about Google offering the Nexus One smartphone at cost – making money from having more devices in the market running the Google backed Android.

That has since been proved utterly false, and it seems that the HTC built device will actually make the manufacturers and, presumably, Google a nice slice of cash if iSuppli's figures are correct.

Minus manufacturing, marketing, software and royalties

Of course, you do need to factor in manufacturing, marketing, software and royalties to that figure – not insignificant amounts of money, but unlikely to run to the $355 difference between RRP and parts-costs.

"With the Nexus One, Google has taken the most advanced features seen in recent smart phone designs and wrapped them up into a single sleek design," said Kevin Keller, Senior Analyst, competitive analysis, for iSuppli.

"Items like the durable unibody construction, the blazingly fast Snapdragon baseband processor and the bright and sharp Active-Matrix Organic Light Emitting Diode (AM-OLED) display all have been seen in previous phones, but never before combined into a single design.

"This gives the Nexus One the most advanced features of any smart phone ever dissected by iSuppli's Teardown Analysis Service - a remarkable feat given the product's BOM is similar to comparable products introduced during the past year."

The most expensive components were the 1GHz Snapdragon processor – which iSuppli prices at $30.50 (c£19), the AMOLED screen (£14.50) and the NAND flash memory (£12.60).