Tag Heuer readies €4700 Froyo phone

Would you pay €4700 (£4222) for a smartphone running Android 2.2 Froyo? Posh watchmaker Tag Heuer hopes you will - it's working on just such a beast. There's a teaser on Tag Heuer's own website, but watch blog A Blog To Read has been mailed some snaps of the gadget and the specs. Tag Heuer Link Tag has gone OTT with the …

[Tim Greenwood]

Another ...

triumph of style over substance, form over function or whatever.

The only thing to be said is I hope that plenty of people have the money and the stupidity to buy them and hopefully subsidise the better but less bling products for the rest of us.

[morphoyle]

it's about the label

Luxury devices aren't about the latest and greatest, and never have been. It's about the label. People that want to show off their money will still buy this.

[Anonymous Coward]

oh dear

Putting the TAG in Tragic.

[Piro]

Come on, it HAS to have bad specs

Because then at least there are no redeeming features, and you can sum up the person who buys such a thing as having more money than sense.

.. and they're probably a bell-end.

[DrXym]

I wonder

Does it come preloaded with an "I am rich (and stupid)" app?

[Bear Features]

oh dainty

I'm sure the likes of Lewis Hamilton will buy one *rolleyes*

[Gnoitall]

A product for the same clientele which would buy

a Romain Jerome "Day&Night" watch: $300,000, only tells you if it's daytime or nighttime, and looks fabulous on your wrist.

The intent is not functional, unless the function is screaming "LOOK HOW MUCH MONEY I HAVE!"

[Ted Treen]

Well at least

it will stop all the rabid anti-Apple mob whining about the cost of the iPhone.

[Andy 36]

Would I buy it?

NO!

[Anonymous Coward]

Big brown knobbly Turd

That is all.

[Craigness]

Posh?

Tah Heuer aren't posh, they're the sort of watch you'd expect to find in Cash Converters. Pure chav material. You wouldn't see a Blancpain branded phone.

Paris, because there's not Kerry Katona icon.

[Anonymous Coward]

Fugly

The word 'fugly', though perhaps not in m-w.com, applies to this phone.

[Anonymous Coward]

How can something so expensive...

... look so cheap?

Paris....

[Jolyon Smith]

"In short, there's nothing special in the spec - it's the looks that count here"

It's from a watch company - what more do you expect ?

Watch 2.0 - this one doesn't just tell the time and date, but it also ... um ... well look, it does a bloody good job of telling the time and date and well ... um ... I mean look at it... it's gooooorgeous.

Well, for that matter, the same is largely true of the phone (hardware) companies too. Sure, there are differences in screen size, memory capacity (RAM and storage), etc etc, but at the end of the day a phone is a phone is a phone, and you can find any number of examples with near as dammit identical specifications from different (or indeed the SAME) manufacturer, where the only significant differentiator is "style".

Phones long sinced stopped being sold as utilitarian devices that were (initially) status symbols (I'M ON THE PHONE!) and are now fashion accessories that also happen to have some attendant value as a utility.

[Anonymous Coward]

WHY?

Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should.

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh

Errrr ..... no.

[Anonymous Coward]

That phone requires a new word

"fugly" doesn't come close to describing it, "fushideous" is closer but still not enough. Ah yes, actual swearwords help here: Fucking shitting hideous .

My god, it could have an OS from the gods of code, and I still wouldn't use the thing.

Mind you, bearing in mind the people I normally see wearing Tag Heuers, it'll probably sell very well ;->

Now this, I like: http://www.uncells.com/

[George 24]

Brands and fashion

The price to pay for brand name. Really it is like paying Louis Vuitton price for a suitcase or Dior for a perfume... Some just have too much money.

[N13L5]

there must be some retarded people with more cash than they know what to do with

If you measure your self-worth by carrying around ostentatious junk, you might want to do something less embarrassing than this phone...

Just have yourself a zircon encrusted gold case made for a Samsung Galaxy S2 or an HTC Sensation. At least you'll have decent tech under the hood.

[Robredz]

Is this the ultimate alternative to the I-Phone for those Bonus Rich Bankers?

I wouldn't pay them in washers for this, it can get lost, stolen or dropped just like a £5 Alcatel. Besides once they are bitten, it is difficult to wean the Fanbois (and girls) off their Jobsian obsession, with their I-Phones

[sandman]

Cheap

For a luxury item, that's cheap. There's a shop in Burlington Gardens that sells stuff for people who have just about everything. How about a mobile phone case that only fits one model of phone, encrusted with small black diamonds and costing somewhere north of £30,000?

[chr0m4t1c]

Question

Is this *just* a phone, or is it - like Vertu - a service that also provides a handset?

[Kristian Walsh]

Spec? In this market?

I direct the Honourable Commentards to their nearest Vertu concession, where they can be relieved of £30,000 for a mobile telephone whose spec-sheet is shamed by a £50 Nokia C2.

That, incidentally, is the point. Fitting a device like this with the latest and greatest will just make the thing feel obsolete in two years time, when none of the snazzy software is supported anymore, or the latest Android won't run on its hardware (this is where this TAG fails, IMO).

My previous phone was a Nokia 8800 Sirocco, the dark steel one, not the chavtastic gold, I might add. It was technologically outdated when I bought it, four years ago, but it's still as beautifully designed, constructed and finished today as it was back then, and I've seen nothing since that could come close to it. Had I spend the (considerable) cost on a top-end smartphone, it would have been sold on in 18 months once its features were surpassed.

Oh, in case anyone thinks I'm defending this TAG thing here, I'm not. It's horrible, just like all their other products. The only way it could be made tackier would be if you put a prancing horse badge on it (facing in either direction; both will make you look like a tosser).

[N13L5]

Thats the whole pathetic problem...

people who feel worthless, unless they decorate themselves with the likes of Vertu products and similar crap are 'tossers', seeking to impress similarly senseless tossers around them, at great cost to all those people on this planet that are not completely psychotic.

Its these tossers who buy diamonds and end up financing the illegal diamond trade, responsible for a good share of all the pointless killing in Afrika, just as one example.

[John Tserkezis]

Nope. That doesn't do it for me.

Some time back, I was invited to a themed party (Gilligan's Island) and I opted to go as the professor. Along with the usual shirt filled with pens, I brought a coconut phone as well.

Fully functional, I cut a coconut shell around my (then early model nokia phone), and pushed in some packing peanuts in the cavity to fill in the gaps and give it a bit of white filler for asthetics.

When placed face-down on the desk, it would look like a plain coconut sitting on a desk if it weren't for the antenna poking out at the end.

Cost a couple of bucks for the coconut, and the use of power tools to work the shell.

I had this built a couple of weeks before the party, and it was so sucessful, I kept it as-is for the next two months. It was that good.

On the other end of the scale, you have that Tag Heuer monstrosity.

It begs to ask what *where* they smoking when they come up with that idea?

[Thomas 4]

Nice

I'd buy a coconut phone.

[Paul Naylor]

Is it just me

or does it seem to be the case that the more expensive something is, the tackier it is? This looks shite.