An update. I recieved two of these cameras (Thanks Shawn), and took five minutes today to open one up.

The manufacturers are, I guarantee you, spending considerably more than $10.99 on these things. The plastic case alone probably costs half that. The lens (a glass, multilayer coated one in a metal housing) easily accounts for the other half. In addition there is a semi-custom processor (Sunplus SPCA5048-P4), 128KB of flash contain the software for same, 16MB of flash (Samsung K9F2808UOC-YCBO), 8MB of sdram (TMTECH T436416A), lcd controller (HT1621) and lcd, and 1.3MP colour cmos imager (Micron MT9M001C12STC-ES), on a 4-layer PCB, along with other miscellaneous discrete crap. There is also a separate sub-board with a rather nice flash unit on, battery holder with two AA bateries, a beeper, various switches, and an edge connector that carries the computer IO port.

The connector obviously has USB on it, and as far as I can tell has the following pinout:

Pin 1 - not connected
Pin 2 - ground
Pin 3 - not connected
Pin 4 - not connected
Pin 5 - not connected
Pin 6 - USB +v (5V in)
Pin 7 - ground
Pin 8 - USB data (-, I think)
Pin 9 - USB data (+, I think)
Pin 10 - ground

I had to take the imager chip (a 48-pin leadless ceramic chip with a transparent top) off the PCB to get the part number, as it's helpfully printed on the bottom

That's as far as I've gotten. It really needs someone to write a driver for the USB device, but that may be difficult without knowing the protocol I could always socket the flash chip, and just take it out to dump the contents, I suppose.

pca