Originally Posted by
BonzoESC
The reason high-end phones are $600 at all and not thousands of dollars is the number of units the enormous fixed costs for research, design, development, and certification are spread across. Having an extra model that takes two SIMs means another model that carriers will want to test...
That's just a problem in manufacturer's approach to the problem. Just design a dual-sim phone and do a full testing of it and then disable (either by software or hardware - e.g. it's common not to solder some elements on the board in various versions of PC motherboards) the the second sim functionality for the mainstream model. R&D cost will be just marginally higher... and with the right planning manufacturing cost of the mainstream model would stay at the same level, while the price of the dual sim model could cover the differnces.