Number One: Nokia don't wanna sell too many N900. In fact I'm sure they feel they are selling too much of them. I'm quite sure nobody smiles in Nokia when they see N900 at the top of the list. Reason? They are not ready yet to make Maemo their main OS. Number two: Pure mathematics. Supose integration of N900 costs 100 Euros. Supose they sell it by 200. Ok. Other expenses (marketing, shop channel, relationship with distributors, trips,...) cost 80 Euros. So they make 20 Euros for every unit sold.

See the mathematics here? Imagine the price of 600 Euros. Margin? 420 per Unit. That is 21 times more.

So they have the same margin selling 10 milion units at the actual price that selling 210 milion at a cheaper price.

And the point here is: They are going to sell it anyway for 200 Euros. Don't worry. They simply are not going to do it now. They'll do it in a year or so, so their return will triple or quadruple.

When they'll have the first milion that buys for 600 they'll move down to 500. Then 400 and so on.

All steps slow enough so you say "ok, I buy it!!" just before another price cut.

Finally, in Nokia favour, you must think they are not the only ones playing this game. Everybody is and mostly their own supliers surely play the same game with them.

I'm sure last generation chips and memory follow the same price phylosophy even for Nokia.

Nokia is surely paying much more for 32GB memory now that what they'll pay next year. And that is simply becouse major players of the market decided not to put too much of them out there, so Sony, Nokia, Apple and whoever wanna have a high end device out there pays them what they want to.