Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is no official source on that which I could quote. But it is what I have been told by people involved. There is another aspect, a lump sum of 5-15$ per unit might look like a lot of money for M$, but over a 2y period thats not much. All that such a deal would do is to make the phone a bit more expensive, same as if another earthquake hit and some parts like CPUs or RAM became more costly. Carriers would easily…
I do not know the licensing fee involved with WP7, but demanding higher royalties on Android devices might be a way to push vendors into switching. Also, 5-15$ is significant when comparing it with the manufacturing costs of the device (the iPhone 4S CPU is estimated at 15$ by iSuppli ( http://www.isuppli.com/Teardowns/MarketWatch/Pages/For-the-i... ).
Re: Microsoft now paid royalties on 70% of US Android smartphones
#31Vendors have to make sure they build phones that they can sell, the phone being simply $15 cheaper won't do that. Apple sells more 4S than 4 and more 4 than 3GS, so it cannot be that the price is the only decision point