Hasta La Gadget!

Analyst firm iSuppli has adopted a unique niche in the world of gadget reporting: the teardown.

Taking the “unboxing” trend to the next level (and do people care about packaging material that much?) iSuppli typically buys a gadget, takes it apart, and provides a cost estimate of what it cost the assemble. The end number usually doesn’t mean too much to the average consumer, although knowing the gross margin on a product also allows guesses as to how much it can be discounted in future revisions. And that’s worth knowing.

With the Palm Pre, however, iSuppli has attempted a “virtual teardown,” basically a series of guesses as to what components are in the Pre, and how much they cost. As you might suspect, this is far less precise.

The Pre costs $137.83 in materials cost, and carries an estimated bill-of-materials cost of $170.02, which is much closer to the actual cost of manufacturing when manufacturing and software development is factored in.

At $300, that leaves about $130 in profit for Palm, although, at a subsidized price of about $200, the Pre’s expected margins will be much slimmer. And Palm also has to cross these other items off of its checklist before the Palm can be considered a hit.

Microsoft once again denied they’re making a branded mobile phone, as a confusing Wall Street Journal article seemed to say Microsoft and Verizon Wireless were working on some sort of device.

“Microsoft is not going into the phone hardware business,” spokesman John Starkweather said. “Microsoft is not building a Zune-specific phone. We’re deepening our relationships with our hardware partners.”

Verizon, of course, does not comment on rumors and speculation.

A close read of the Journal story shows it may mean much less than it appears at first glance. You can read the entire story as, “Verizon Wireless will launch phones with the next version of Windows Mobile software.”

That’s almost a non-story. Verizon Wireless has carried Windows Mobile phones for years, and there’s no reason to believe they would stop.

Here we go again. On CNN, a caller by the name of Alberto told HLN money expert Clark Howard that he was charged $62,000 to download the movie WALL-E for his nephew while vacationing in Mexico, according to Ars Technica. As is probably obvious to everyone by now, the caller forgot to activate a data roaming plan on his cellular data card before leaving for the trip.

Of course, the carrier would never think to alert the customer of such a thing beforehand–and any text alerts about extra charges get lost in the ether when you’re using a data card. After some haggling on the phone, the carrier “reduced the bill to $17,000, arguing that the five-figure charge was what it cost them to deliver the movie”–which is baloney, given the existence of said international data roaming plans.

It’s tempting to blame the customer, and granted, he should have checked into this. But at the same time, I run into well-meaning folks all the time who forget to update their virus definitions on their PCs, or even install a security suite in the first place. A beginner’s mistake, but no worse or better than not knowing about how to reconfigure a data plan. A $17,000 bill isn’t fair, period.

T-Mobile said that it has sold 1 million Google Android-powered G1 smartphones since the device’s launch in October 2008, according to Macworld.

That number falls short of the 3.7 million first-generation iPhones Apple sold during the same time period back in the second half of 2007. But given the tremendous hype surrounding the iPhone at launch time, the one million number isn’t bad at all for the G1–and roughly on par with another high-profile device, the BlackBerry Storm. Although that device sold one million in about two months before sales slowed, so even that one is ahead of the G1.

Regardless of the level of success the T-Mobile G1 has seen, we’re all still waiting to see more Android-powered devices–an increasingly worrisome proposition, given Google’s apparent lack of follow-through, device vendors’ polite-but-unaggressive support, and the lack of any enthusiasm whatsoever on the part of U.S. wireless carriers.

Alltel Wireless has announced that the BlackBerry Pearl Flip 8230 smartphone will hit retail stores and the online site beginning in early May.

The handset is one of the few flip smartphones out there, combining the popular form factor with a genuine BlackBerry handheld. This model is a bit larger than most other flips–it extends more than half a foot when fully opened–but it features the Pearl’s SureType-style QWERTY keyboard, along with a 2.3-inch LCD and a 2 megapixel camera.

The 8230 is essentially the same as the somewhat buggy 8220 model on T-Mobile that we reviewed several months ago, except that the 8230 lacks Wi-Fi. Hopefully RIM and Alltel will have cleaned up some of the bugs by the time the handset is released–most notably, an extremely slow Web browser implementation (much more so than other BlackBerrys).