Originally posted by GeneV All that could have been done for an internal board (using a third party to build it).
People usually misunderstand how things work in electronic world (yes, I am engineer working with NAND related products, working for big player company that builds products in storage segment)
Who would you get to provide the board? To keep it simple, lets say Ricoh would have paid FLU card people to embed their WIFI tech or FLU circuitry in Pentax's main board... Piece of cake, electronic manufacturers do this ALL THE TIME... However, here's the catch:
1- FLU, or any other company for that matter, will not sell their tech for pennies. Just consider the theoretical amount of money they make on their SD cards... cost of SD card: lets say $15 to keep it simple, Value of their Intellectual Property : $60 Total price of the FLU SD card: $75 (or whatever the MSRP of this card is). If they were to sell this to Ricoh, they are not going to sell the IP (right to use the wifi board) for much much less than that.
2- yes you can go to any other wifi card designer/supplier and buy a board from them, but that generates another problem: Do they have the infrastructure that FLU/eyefi have? do they have the apps for you ready to use? do they have phone apps, pc apps that are clearly focused for photography use? most likely NOT!.
So these leaves Ricoh with a few options to chose from:
a) Pay Flu/Eyefi/etc a steep royalty to embed the wifi board in our camera, boosting the cost of the product in the order of tens of dollars (yes this is significant for a BOM even for a $1300 product) and most likely not hitting the projected cost targets for this product
b) Pay cheaper price for another 3rd party to embed a generic wifi board, which is cheaper, would allow them to hit the BOM cost, but at the expense of them(ricoch), having to build all the infrastructure, mobile apps, drivers, pc apps, software, you name it. which will heavily delay the release of the feature and, on top of that, is something that them (ricoh/pentax) don't necessarily have experience with
c) they promote this feature with a already tested solution, with no significant changes to the FW, BOM, PCB. They most likely have to pay way way way less in royalties as FLU will keep making money on the SD cards just like they have been, they hit BOM targets, they hit time table targets, the product hits the market on time, etc etc etc.
winning option: C. And that is what they have here today.
So, long story short, the fact that you see a wifi board in the market for 30 cents, does not mean that ricoh can attach one to a camera with duct tape and everything will be fine. There are many other factors..
I personally think is way better idea to rely on solid/proven infrastructures (in this case FLU) than ricoh trying to design their own and make a mediocre/bad job at it and give yet another reason for people to laugh at.
Sorry for long post