back to article Vertu-alised Android revealed at an all-too-real €7,900

Vertu, the luxury phone brand Nokia last year sold to a private outfit EQT, has revealed its first Android-powered smartphone. The €7,900 ($US10,624 or £6,778) handset runs Ice Cream Sandwich, aka Android 4.0, boasts a “sapphire screen” said to be astoundingly scratch resistant and “four times stronger than other smart phones …

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  1. Esskay
    Facepalm

    $200 last-gen phone, covered with expensive crap

    Yup, sounds like Vertu to me.

    The sort of people who pay stupid amounts of money to make their average phone look pretty sound like the type of people who pay stupid amounts of money to make their average girlfriend look pretty. As such, a casino sounds like the perfect place to sell them.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      And still...

      ...it has less than 12 hours of useful battery life...

    2. Shagbag

      $10,600 = 53 x $200

      That's 53 seperate instances of the horse trampling on your phone before the thing breaks even.

      Pun intended.

      Seriously, for someone that accident-prone, they're better off spending the $10,600 on phone insurance.

      Alternatively, even at $800 per phone, $10,600 is an upgrade* plan to last next decade.

      *excluding iPhones, of course, as that would be a 'downgrade' given their current plan of bringing to market old tech at new tech prices, like the i5.

      1. Great Bu

        Re: $10,600 = 53 x $200

        Surely they would be better spending $1000 ona shotgun and shooting the horse.

        Also make some money back flogging the carcass* to Tesco.

        *Insert flogging dead horse pun here

        1. David Hicks

          Re: $10,600 = 53 x $200

          If your horse steps on your phone 53 times, maybe it's trying to tell you something.

          1. Ken 16 Silver badge

            Re: $10,600 = 53 x $200

            It's telling you that it wants to pursue an exciting opportunity in the pre-packaged food industry

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: $200 last-gen phone, covered with expensive crap

      They're hand made in the UK. So those thinking we can make phones here cheaply should take note.

  2. tony2heads
    Coat

    NFC??

    Surely one has flunkies to pay for ones purchases

    coat - one was wearing the ermine robe

    1. Esskay

      Re: NFC??

      I think in this instance NFC = No Fucking Clue

  3. ratfox
    Angel

    "can survive a strike from a 110-gram ball bearing"

    There must be something missing in this sentence. I'm pretty sure that most phones will survive having a 110-gram ball bearing dropped on them.

    1. DrXym

      Re: "can survive a strike from a 110-gram ball bearing"

      And even if they couldn't, you could just buy a new phone. You'd have to be pretty unlucky and have 20 such ball strikes within the space of 2 years for this to be a remotely justifiable reason to buy.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: "can survive a strike from a 110-gram ball bearing"

        a remotely justifiable reason

        I deal with people like this. The idea of having to justify a purchase in any way, shape or form is a tad alien to them. They take the term "impulse buying" to a whole new stratosphere.

    2. Chemist

      Re: "can survive a strike from a 110-gram ball bearing"

      "There must be something missing in this sentence"

      Like what HEIGHT it was dropped from. I pretty certain most things would stand it being dropped 0.01mm

      1. Ommerson
        FAIL

        Re: "can survive a strike from a 110-gram ball bearing"

        The scientific illiteracy continues with '50kg of pressure'.

        1. Katie Saucey

          Re: "can survive a strike from a 110-gram ball bearing"

          You're being to hard on the poor writers, it's not like there's a vast resource of free reference (copy and paste) material at their finger tips. </sarcasm>

          Illiteracy aside, if the "50kg of pressure" is taken as the "arts major translation" of kgf/cm^2 then this is a pretty bold claim (that's roughly the total pressure at an ocean depth of 500m).

  4. DrXym

    Attention stupid rich people

    Please form an orderly queue for your overpriced slab of ugly.

  5. This post has been deleted by its author

  6. WeaselNo7
    WTF?

    <probably mistaken pedant>

    Hang on.

    500NM as a force? The N is a force (Newtons), no idea what the M is. perhaps they mean it's a pressure and measured in Nm^-2 ?

    And 50kg of pressure? That's just a mass, right? It's not a pressure until it becomes a force (add gravity?) and you say how much it is concentrated over an area?

    However, every day is a school day, there's probably some internationally-recognised shorthand going on here. The kind that I'm kept out of the loop on. On purpose. Bastards.

    1. This post has been deleted by its author

      1. WeaselNo7
        Thumb Up

        Re: <probably mistaken pedant>

        Aha, gotcha. Needs a little 'm' though. Crikey, that article is a tragedy of units.

        1. Adam 1

          Re: <probably mistaken pedant>

          But what is that in blue whales?

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: <probably mistaken pedant>

        "That's quite a lot, I think an Armalite bullet is around 200J."

        I think you might be a little out there. I've no idea what the bullet weight is but at (say) 800m/s and a weight of say 50g I'd make the kinetic energy ~2500J

        1. John H Woods Silver badge

          Re: <probably mistaken pedant>

          "at (say) 800m/s and a weight of say 50g I'd make the kinetic energy ~2500J"

          Isn't kinetic energy 1/2 m v^2? In which case your assumptions should make it 1/2 * 0.05kg * (800 m/s)^2 = 16kJ

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: <probably mistaken pedant>

            "at (say) 800m/s and a weight of say 50g I'd make the kinetic energy ~2500J"

            You are quite right - my fault - I'd done the calculation using several different values and scrambled the results when posting a little later. Certainly a LOT more than 200J though.

        2. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: <probably mistaken pedant>

          You are right; I had a decimal point in the wrong place, which will teach me to try to do rough conversions between American and world units in my head.

          It looks like this phone only needs to survive a pistol shot. Disappointing, but may tell us something about its target market.

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: <probably mistaken pedant>

            may tell us something about its target market.

            Target on shooting ranges?

      3. TeeCee Gold badge

        Re: <probably mistaken pedant>

        I suspect that when they're talking about 500J merely deforming the case, they mean as long as that is distributed over the casing. e.g. as per the horse's hoof alluded to.

        I'll bet your Armalite round still goes straight through one, partly because all its "oof" is concentrated in one place, but mostly because a bit of checking reveals that the Winchester .308 round used in the civilian Armalite packs 1,947 foot/pounds, which is about 2600 joules.......

    2. John Robson Silver badge
      Stop

      Re: <probably mistaken pedant>

      NM = torque, so presumably they mean you can use it as a really short lever?

      1. Chemist

        Re: <probably mistaken pedant>

        "NM = torque, so presumably they mean you can use it as a really short lever?"

        It's both torque and energy and it should be Nm BTW

    3. Great Bu

      Re: <probably mistaken pedant>

      Nm is the unit for torque and it's being used to describe how stiff the case is to flexion i.e. they twist it with a force of 500Nm and the corner moves less than 1mm.

  7. Magnus Ramage

    Way-out hypothesis

    Perhaps the average readership of the Reg is not the target market for this device?

    (Not that that should stop anyone being scornful of people with more money than sense, and the marketing drones who draw them in like ants to honey.)

    1. Dave 126 Silver badge

      Re: Way-out hypothesis

      It's not for us, it's for Russian politicians. Move on.

      http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/headlines/2009/10/russian-officials-sporting-watches-worth-up-to-1-million/

      http://www.hodinkee.com/blog/2012/6/7/vladimir-putins-watch-collection-worth-six-years-of-his-decl.html [Putin's watch collection worth six years of his declared income]

      I get the impression that it is not a good idea to mock Mr Putin, for any reason.

      Oh, not sure sure about the phrase about sapphire being "said to be very scratch resistant". Is is. The only way you're likely to scratch it is if you let you trophy girlfriend handle it when she's wearing daimond rings, or if you've just done some DIY with a diamond cutting disk and the dust has got in your pocket. Sapphire is routinely grown for watch crystals.

  8. Jason Hindle

    Not a nice looking phone

    Normally, I regard the Vertu as a phone for people with more money than sense. In this instance, I think we can safely replace sense with taste.

  9. sandman

    Cheap!

    I used to work in Mayfair and there was a shop next to our offices that sold stuff that you could never imagine needing to people with more money than sense or taste. My favourite items were mobile phone covers (this is in 2000, so we're talking Nokia, Motorola, etc). How about one covered in black diamonds for £36,000? The best thing was that each was made for a specific model of phone, so when you wanted to change your phone, you just chucked the case and presumably purchased a new one.

  10. Metrognome

    It's not the phone - it's the concierge service

    Vertu's cost is mostly for the Concierge Service, essentially a personal butler available on-demand and with access to tickets/venues/clubs/services that you'd otherwise either not be able to secure or have to pay a hell of a lot more for.

    Still, as Magnus presciently noted above, maybe Reg techies are not quite their main demographic.

    1. DrXym

      Re: It's not the phone - it's the concierge service

      There are lots of services like that, some which come free with high end credit cards. No reason to be tied to some substandard spec phone in a bling case.

    2. Joe Pineapples
      Thumb Up

      Re: It's not the phone - it's the concierge service

      I believe the Concierge service is free for the first year, then is paid for in future years. The base phone is Titanium and sapphire guys! It's not for everyone, but these are not disposable phones. Ok, even if they last 10 years (which they do - see amount of early Signature phones still in service) they are still expesive. But so is a Porsche or Ferrari.

      If you want a Focus, fine, they both do the job, I just know which I'd prefer if I had tthe money..

  11. Bod

    Not the first smartphone

    Not the first smartphone they've done. Though if you consider only Android and iOS to be valid smartphone operating systems, then yes you could say that. They've been doing Symbian based smartphones for a while. First was essentially based on the Nokia E72 and then there was a touch screen Symbian flavour model.

    The big thing here is the break from Nokia. Here we have an Android phone from a former Nokia company. Elop should keep a close eye on this.

    1. JetSetJim

      Re: Not the first smartphone

      IIRC Nokia still own 10% of Vertu, so it's still a little bit Nokia :)

  12. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Now it is Android's turn to be overpriced crap.

  13. MarcusB

    "can survive a strike from a 110-gram ball bearing"

    But will it blend..?

  14. Greg D
    FAIL

    Even if I were rich enough...

    ...to afford this ugly slab of ugliness, I think I'd still "slum it" with my Galaxy Note II.

    Did I mention it was FUGLY? Like REALLY FUGLY? It's like the designer went on a 1980's design course, realised he was in the 2000's, and this was the best he could come up with given the knowledge he had. I mean look at how FAT it is!

    It's also probably less advanced in the materials department compared to say a HTC One X - forgetting the screen durability.

  15. The_Regulator

    Rofl

    And it still crashes,freezes and lets in too much malware....all the money in the world couldn't.......

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