Which smartphone do you buy when you have all the money in the world? You could buy an iPhone and gold-plate it or get the new Vertu Constellation, which isn’t made out of gold. It’ll likely cost about the same as a gilded smartphone, though. But if you have all the money in the world, who cares?
Vertu is known for making bonkers-expensive smartphones that routinely come in at around or past the R100,000 mark. Their new Constellation is likely no exception. The company’s newest Android is made from anodised aluminium and leather sourced from a tannery in Italy. It’s set to be hand-assembled in England and counts the Snapdragon 820, 4GB of RAM, 128GB of storage, a 3,220mAh battery and a 12MP camera among its specifications. It should be quite the little performer.
On to the truly luxury portions of the phone, there’s a 5.5in, 2,560 x 1,440 crystal sapphire display (sixth generation, as Vertu points out) and then a ruby set into the side of the phone which acts as a button conferring access to Vertu’s Concierge services. Concierge, Life and Certainty offer users a personal assistant (a real, human one), exclusive access to high-end events in cities you can’t afford to travel to, and security and encryption for your device, respectively. That’s mostly what you’re paying for — the high-end specs and construction materials, not so much.
The Vertu Constellation doesn’t have a price for the moment but we suspect, like previous handsets, that if you have to ask how much it costs, you can’t afford it. It’ll become available in mid-February and you’ll probably see it in South Africa. If you have the huge tracts of cash, that is.
