People have to remember that SONY makes alot of the components for the NGP and most likely the whole lot unlike the 3DS that uses Screens from i believe Toshiba. 

No one has an single clue that SONY could be selling at an lost. Nor the Manufacturing or the costs of the components of the NGP. I dont and no one here or on the internet other than SONY employees that manage finance. 

But my prediction on the Pricing plan would be 3 ways to buy 

1st: Would be an 3G data plan with an telco provider, were depending on the plan pay from full price to 0 dollars. 

2nd: Would be an no 3G model that you buy from your electronic retailers at the cheapest price avaiable 

3rd: Would be an unlocked version of the 3G, and will be the most expensive model but you have freedom. 

For me in Australia, an 20 dollar an month several gb contact with Telstra and only having to pay 200 dollars for the device is an neat deal for myself considering Telstra has the worlds fasted wireless 3G network. 

Yeah, this is just as I thought.  You have absolutely no idea how much it costs to manufacture each components. ¬_¬

If Sony could make their phones or phone like devices so much cheaper than the competition, they why aren't they doing so right now? As it is, there phone division isn't all that profitable, nor are their phones any cheaper or more technologically advanced above the competition.

You know this is insane, right?

Sensors:

All of those sensors are in the PSMove which is 50$ at retail. That's all of the sensors of the PSMove and everything else that makes up the controller...

Processors: 

It's using a chipset that's inline with the iPhone 4 which also has 512MB of ram which I might add. huge for a portable. The iPhone 4 in it's entirety is less than 180 to manufacture...

I don't know about the rest of the stuff.

It's called selling at a large profit.  Apple set the precedent, everyone else just follows.  Why do you think service providers charge you a lot less for the phone if you sign up with them?  It's because they pay a lot less for them than you would if you payed MSRP.  They probably are only charged a little more than it costs Apple, Sony, etc. to manufacture them.

i was talking about the manufacturing cost being low

The components are a lot cheaper then you think for the manufacturor.

When I was working for a navigation company we were talking about adding gyroscope and accelerometer sensors in the device to continue tracking the path of the device when the gps reception is interrupted. The price of those sensors are only a couple of dollars (for mass production). The hi-res screen was by far the most expensive component at between 20 and 30 dollars depending on the model. (Ofcourse every penny saved at the bill of components translates into a much bigger cost reduction at the store price)

The ngp is a lot smaller then the ps3, and therefore a lot more economical to ship, and uses less material to build. There is no reason at all that the ngp should cost more to build then a ps3, there is no expensive blu-ray drive in there with lots of moving parts after all.

I'm not convinced that people would be interested in a data plan for a gaming system ...

Most people see smart phones as universal communication devices because you can talk, text, email, use chat programs, update facebook, twitter, etc; and most of the functionality of these devices requires a data plan. Now, I could be wrong but I suspect that if someone wanted to pay for a subsidized electronics device for communication purposes they would probably choose a smart phone of some kind.

This means that for the data plan to be meaningful for the NGP people would have to want it for a game related function; and this would be for playing games online or downloading game content. From what I know about 3G (which isn't much) I don't think it is well suited to playing games online, it is a relatively expensive service for someone to pay just to play games online, it would be painful to download games due to the bandwith, and in many countries a single game could push an individual passed their monthly bandwith limit and end up costing them a lot of money.

Apple gross margin is in the ~40%. If the ASP of the iPhone is at 625 US$, do you really think the manufacturing cost is near 200 US$? That gives you a gross margin near 70%, not in line with apple numbers.

you are wrong on the costs there. You will be susprized how cheap they can make and buy those things. See when it comes to prices we only see the comsumer price which is around 200% higher than the maufacturing in most cases.

for You to buy an quad 4 ARM proccessor would cost you around 300 , for sony they would of sign an deal with ARM for the maunfacturing specs, started making the proccessors and dont mark up there own component for the system so the real cost for the proccessor would be <50 dollars max.

Those 2 cameras would cost <1-3 dollars for both, trackpad will again cost close to nothing.

the most expensive items will be the case, screen, memory and proccessor. The maufacturing costs could be around 200 dollars an system but they have to sell it to the retailes at around 100% mark up to make them happy and allow sales.