When a shiny new tablet or smartphone launches, 99.9% of us want to get our grubby hands on it. The remainder, however, simply want to tear it apart to find out what makes it tick. The HP TouchPad launched on July 1, and now, six days later, IHS iSuppli has finished its teardown and provided us with the exact list of components and their cost: Rs 14500. With a manufacturing cost of around Rs 540, and a sale price of Rs 26,700, that’s quite a tidy profit margin indeed.
For the most part, the TouchPad’s hardware is comparable to the iPad 2. Curiously, the TouchPad uses the same LG display as the first-generation iPad — fairly old technology by this point — but beyond that, each of the components seems to tally up with Apple’s market leader. There’s is a whole gigabyte of DRAM in the TouchPad, however, compared to 512MB in the iPad 2 — but whether that will actually make a difference in app performance remains to be seen; it could simply mean that webOS is more demanding than iOS when it comes to RAM usage.
The TouchPad’s only real ace in the hole is its processor, the Qualcomm Snapdragon APQ8060. Clocked at 1.2GHz and sporting the brand new Adreno 220 GPU, the TouchPad should be far more powerful than the iPad 2 and its ancient SGX543 PowerVR GPU. The Adreno 220 is apparently capable of “console-like quality” (video), stereoscopic 3D, and more. Like the larger pool of DRAM, though, the faster processor will only be significant if apps and games for the webOS platform can leverage the extra power.
Puzzlingly, the Qualcomm APQ8060 system-on-chip comes with a cellular modem capable of 3G communications, but for some reason HP has decided to make the TouchPad Wi-Fi-only for now. The TouchPad also has a wireless battery-charging induction loop, but it’s unlikely that it adds a significant amount to the device’s total cost.
Finally, just to add a little context, the 3G 32GB iPad 2 costs Rs 14500 to make — and if you take the cellular baseband out (Rs 800), that price comes down to just Rs 13480. Yes, believe it or not, the slim-and-beautiful Wi-Fi iPad 2 costs $10 less to make than the plastic-shelled, fat-bodied Wi-Fi TouchPad. It actually makes Apple hardware sound reasonably priced — until you look at the 3G iPad 2, of course, which costs some Rs 32,575. It’s fair to assume, however, that the 3G TouchPad, when it inevitably arrives, will also cost around the same amount.
