BlackBerry Bold gets torn down, costs just over $169

By Tim Conneally | Published October 27, 2008, 1:00 PM

On Election Day, November 4, Research In Motion is slated to finally release the BlackBerry Bold, the more traditionally designed of RIM's newest BlackBerrys. Market analysis firm iSuppli today has released a teardown of the device.

According to iSuppli's teardown, the costliest aspect of the Bold is Marvell's processor, at $34.34, or roughly 22% of the device's total cost. Recently, UK carrier Orange halted the Bold's sales, citing dubious software problems. Many wondered if the problems were really related to Marvell's PXA chipset, which is based on the Intel XScale microarchitecture. Almost all processing takes place on the chip, including applications processing, and digital/analog baseband.

Samsung provides the Bold's 2.65-inch 320x480 TFT display, which accounts for $16 in the bill of materials. Both Samsung and Texas Instruments provide integrated circuits for the Bold, with Samsung supplying the Multichip Module (MCM), and TI supplying the power management and battery charging circuit. The 802.11 module in the Bold is also a Texas Instruments product.

The combined bill of materials and manufacturing cost bring the BlackBerry Bold to $169.41. It is expected to be sold for $299 in the U.S, and already sells in Canada through Rogers Communications for C$399, earning RIM what iSuppli calls "a healthy margin."