Often people (I, at least) don't care what it costs to make a product, but rather care what value it provides. I'd take a free phone (duh), would probably take

Often people (I, at least) don't care what it costs to make a product, but rather care what value it provides. I'd take a free phone (duh), would probably take a chance at $399, but flirting with $550 is beyond the pain point for me. I suppose there are several other people who feel the same way. I'm especially annoyed that this piece of hardware appears to have a AT&T compatible 3G chipset but is disallowed in the baseband. To me this is just another piece-of-crap restricted-use telco-friendly piece of hardware, this time with Google livery. To pay for an unsubsidized phone and not get all of the features that the hardware is clearly capable of (modulo patents: multitouch) is offensive, and makes the $550 to me even more irritating. The whole thing is slightly less appalling when you think of the phone as another iteration of the G1 and MyTouch for T-Mo and not as an honest attempt by Google at offering an open device.