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If your wallet’s as bottomless as Scrooge McDuck’s and your hunger for calfskin and titanium knows no bounds — not even good taste — then Vertu’s new €4,900 (£4,090) Android phone should be heading towards your pocket post-haste.
The new Constellation is the British luxury phonemaker’s second blow-out blower to run Google’s mobile software, but it’s no high-end powerhouse. Your oil fortune is paying not for a Snapdragon 800 chip or even a Full HD screen, but on the rare materials it’s made of.
That leather back isn’t faux leather-effect plastic like the Samsung Galaxy Note 3, it’s a real bit of a dead baby cow. “Carefully selected for its exquisite feel and natural grain from one of Europe’s oldest tanneries,” according to Vertu, it comes in black, beige, brown, orange and pink. Each phone is hand-crafted at Vertu HQ in Church Crookham, Hampshire.
Under the calfskin is genuine grade-5 titanium, which Vertu claims is twice as strong as steel but half the weight, and polished to a fine sheen. Even the glass of the screen is expensive, with the latest in sapphire crystal ensuring it stands up to scratches. If you want an incredibly specific measure of its hardiness, it’s “strong enough to resist the impact of a 200g steel ball being dropped on it from a height of one metre”. Ball bearings are a real hazard for the super-rich, I’m told.
Unfortunately that super-premium exterior is badly let down by components that would have looked mediocre last year. Its screen is only 720p, according to Engadget, far from the exquisite Full HD sharpness of this year’s flagships. Its dual-core 1.7GHz processor is hardly going to give the Sony Xperia Z1 any sleepless nights.
While its 13-megapixel rear camera is a bit more up to date, its 1,800mAh battery is dwarfed by the latest 3,000mAh cells in more powerful phones. Given its meagre innards, it’ll probably still serve up a day’s use, however. 32GB of storage is spacious, but you can’t expand it, and there’s no 4G option — surprising, given oligarchs are pretty much the only people who can afford 4G in the UK at the moment.
A large portion of what you’re paying for is Vertu’s range of personalised services. The Constellation doesn’t get the complete concierge experience that comes with its even more expensive Ti phone, but it does come with unlimited iPass Wi-Fi, Kaspersky anti-virus, a tracking service and encrypted VoIP.
If you have significantly more money than sense and are interested in the Vertu Constellation, register your interest on its website here and a boutique store will contact you to arrange a test drive. Otherwise, let me know what you think in the comments, or on our exclusive Facebook page.
