[Strshps1MoreTim]

A year or so ago I was contracting with a military supplier. The company makes rugged Windows CE handhelds and was looking at jumping to Android. $15 per device was the quote they got from Google.

Now that you mention the number of activations, it's obvious Samsung is not paying that price.

[fpgeek]

That tracks with something else I heard about recently via Twitter: Indian Android OEMs releasing devices without Google Play because they had problems with Google's terms/fees. That was confusing because the only thing I'd seen about Android's economics ( http://www.asymco.com/2012/05/13/android-economics-an-introd... ) said that the money flowed in the other direction: Google paying OEMs for search traffic, etc.

However, if Google is discriminating between OEMs then that makes more sense. The typical terms (that, say, Samsung or HTC gets) might be quite generous, but the Indian OEMs don't get the same deal. I find it a bit surprising that Google couldn't come up with better terms for the huge but poor Indian market, but maybe there were non-export clauses or something similar that got in the way.

[ansible]

For for low-volume products like that, I'd expect a high per-unit cost. The support overhead will vastly outweigh the money Google might make in purchases via the Play store.