Either you or I seem to have a misunderstanding of how taxes work in Europe and the United States. Let's assume for a minute that you live in Germany, which has a 19% VAT rate (on the standard-to-low end for the EU). From what I gather, most MSRP's in Europe include the, so the actual untaxed price is €429-€429(0.19)=€347.49 or $475.47 at the exchange rate you've given. In the United States sales tax is added at the till, so here the pretax price is in fact just $429. So the difference is actually $475.47-$429 = $46.47. There is still a markup, but you've overestimated the profit you think they are taking by over $100. What is left is a markup of 10% in Europe. While some of this may be pure profit, I'm not so sure it is - it might cost more to ship things from southeast Asia where they are made to Europe than to the US (I'm not an expert about this so I could be wrong) and some of it may be to protect them against a sudden drop in the Euro against the Dollar before the retail can be adjust. In any case, no one is forcing you to buy ViewSonic in Europe - so if you don't like the 10% markup, don't buy it. I've never cared for their stuff anyway.
(On another note, sometimes companies do drop the number a little bit before putting a € in front. So if they sold this for €399, the equivalent US pre-tax MSRP would be $442, or just $13 (3%) more at current exchange rates).
The phone has 256MB of RAM and a 1GHz processor, which do the job reasonably well, though the Anna interface will likely leave something to be desired for many smartphone users.
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@ Cheng,
Either you or I seem to have a misunderstanding of how taxes work in Europe and the United States. Let's assume for a minute that you live in Germany, which has a 19% VAT rate (on the standard-to-low end for the EU). From what I gather, most MSRP's in Europe include the, so the actual untaxed price is €429-€429(0.19)=€347.49 or $475.47 at the exchange rate you've given. In the United States sales tax is added at the till, so here the pretax price is in fact just $429. So the difference is actually $475.47-$429 = $46.47. There is still a markup, but you've overestimated the profit you think they are taking by over $100. What is left is a markup of 10% in Europe. While some of this may be pure profit, I'm not so sure it is - it might cost more to ship things from southeast Asia where they are made to Europe than to the US (I'm not an expert about this so I could be wrong) and some of it may be to protect them against a sudden drop in the Euro against the Dollar before the retail can be adjust. In any case, no one is forcing you to buy ViewSonic in Europe - so if you don't like the 10% markup, don't buy it. I've never cared for their stuff anyway.
(On another note, sometimes companies do drop the number a little bit before putting a € in front. So if they sold this for €399, the equivalent US pre-tax MSRP would be $442, or just $13 (3%) more at current exchange rates).