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If £7,000 for an Android smartphone moistens your excitement, today's new launch from Vertu is about to have you soaked.
The Ti is the new flagship device from British luxury mobile phone maker Vertu. Its price, naturally, is the meat within the headline feast, but as far as luxury tech goes the internals surpass many of its more modestly-priced contemporaries.
Inside the Ti is Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich), a dual-core Snapdragon S4 processor clocked at 1.7GHz, 64GB of internal storage, an eight-megapixel camera, NFC communication and a 3.7-inch screen.
On paper many of these specs mirror those of Samsung's Galaxy S3 (the camera, storage, Android version, NFC), and in fact the processor of the Ti is a little speedier (1.7GHz verses the S3's 1.4GHz). The iPhone 5, too, offers comparable specifications. The only real downside specs-wise is the screen's 800x480-pixel resolution, which frankly for seven grand is like buying a Mercedes and discovering it's only got a tape deck for audio.
What is not on par with the world's leading smartphones is the design, which when you strip away the useful bits is basically where your money is going. Head of design for Virtu, Ignacio Germade, attempts to justify: "Long-standing Vertu customers will appreciate the style, the weight and the materials. "As Vertu continues to grow, we will develop a design language that will satisfy the large number of our customers that appreciate classic simplicity of [our other products]...while reaching out to new customers with hand crafted, elegant designs and technology that engages and inspires."
Vertu has an audience in mind and the phone will no doubt find a suitable home amongst them. It's the same target audience that spends thousands of pounds at watch fairs in Basel and own personal
automatic watch winders (I checked with GQ -- they do exist). With smartphones as important as they are to us all, it's no surprise there's a market for egregiously priced incarnations of them.
The bonus is that unlike many products branded "luxury", the technical aspects of the Ti are actually robust, and it's not covered in Swarovski crystals either. And it's not pink. It's bonus after bonus, frankly. They're handmade in England and according to Vertu have undergone various physical stress tests to ensure their high-end exteriors don't succumb easily to the elements of first class social functions.
If you're tempted by all this, the Vertu Ti comes in a range of variants, with prices starting at around £6,800 right the way up to about £14,200 (that's if you want black PVC titanium red gold mixed metals in your casing). It's on sale from today.
Just don't expect it free on a contract.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
