Luxury smartphone brand returns with $41,500 device Vertu, the ostentatious luxury phone brand that began as a brainchild of Nokia, has launched METAVERTU, the "world's first Web3 phone." The device, which supposedly integrates smart terminals, crypto-mining nodes, separate OSs for NFTs and blockchain, high-end service, and whatever other buzzwords you can think of into one …
The actual company who now own the rights to the Vertu name, designs and Branding etc. are Vertu France. They got them from Vertu UK in a corporate restructuring and have a website that says everything else is a fake. The Turkish businessman behind Vertu when it went belly up has an ‘interesting’ past https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2017/03/12/turkish-exile-snaps-smartphone-maker-vertu-50m/" It has been suggested that this intellectual property should not have been transferred and instead have been included in the bankruptcy sale. Was this just an attempt to keep the company going in another country or was it something else?
I’ve played with a few Vertu Phones when they were still going in England, and the only thing about them that really stood out was the build quality especially the sapphire screen. I was given a phone, they said my keys wouldn’t damage the screen and I did give it a really good go but I couldn’t scratch it even with a determined effort. I now have access to the same concierge as they used and it’s not bad. Don’t think that comes with the new phones though.
Actually the clock widgets were very nice and integrated with the calendar.
From the website of an unrelated Hermes handbag:
"The Himalaya Kelly is crafted from Nile crocodile hide. The designation ‘Himalaya’ does not apply to the origin of the bag, but rather to the delicate gradation of the colour. The smoky grey fades into a pearly white, resembling the majestic, snow-capped Himalayas."
I think I need to go lie down as my BS detector just exploded...
These ones live in China. Habitat destruction is driving them up into mountains where it is too cold for their eggs to develop. They would have to swim a long way to get to the Himalayas. Probably better to commute by plane and keep a home near a viable breeding ground.
I too have visited the Himalaya, three times, and clearly am not at all as attractive to the native alligators as I thought I might be. I can only assume that it was the Giardia infection (odour of Hydrogen Sulphide / rotten eggs) that kept them away. (Of course I did carry an 'alligator bite kit', just in case, a bit like a snake bite kit, but so much bigger.)
Incidentally, I thought alligators (short, broad snout) were north American natives, but, hey what do I know?
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These will not be purchased by people who have saved for ages to get together the money, or people that take out a loan. The people that buy these, probably as a gift, will have so much money that the cost of these phones will not be noticed. Small change. Peanuts to them.
Oh what fools they are.
> Oh what fools they are.
You're assuming that there's anyone actually buying this, which is clearly not the case (ok, there's always one) otherwise they would be competing with the real money/fool parters such as Rolex and such. Instead they just keep going broke like it's going out of style.
No, no ROM is correct.
When you pay, they create the lithography masks to fab your own personalised ROM, which is big enough to hold the Forbes 500 Company 'phone directories - and a complete copy of the blockchain(s) that contain the NFT that is the only proof-of-ownership you get for the this 'phone.
If it was Android at least you might be able to hack the bootloader and install generic Linux on it when the vendor no longer supports it. Why should the vendor of a phone that costs this much support it for longer than a year - if you are rich enough to buy it, you are rich enough to buy a new one next year!
Hard to see this competing versus the companies that will take an ordinary iPhone or Samsung Galaxy and replace the case with something made of gold or t.rex skin and mark it up to 10x their cost.
"If it was Android at least you might be able to hack the bootloader and install generic Linux on it when the vendor no longer supports it."
Right, because you can do that with all the phones out there. Why should it be any harder to do that with this device? They're probably using the same general firmware with the same lack of documentation and easy-brick locking systems as most Android devices. Don't assume Android will give you any OS freedom, because you'll have to fight for all of it and often it won't work.
There are lots of good reasons not to buy this ridiculous thing. In fact, the fact that they're trying an alternative OS is the only thing that has any positive attribute whatsoever and that could prove either to be a lie or to not mean anything in the long run. Still, the chances of getting generic Linux to run on any given Android phone are very low.
From the official teaser video that alludes to the famous ad 1984, a young man finally breaks the fruit phone's supremacy. VERTU is implying that a new order has formed as a digital revolution based on WEB 3.0 is about to break out.
Written by people who should suffer the same fate as the marketing division of the Sirius Cybernetic Corporation
For a luxury product, they really didn't spend much time proof-reading their buzzword list. Random spaces missing punctuation, haphazard use of articles, and they even managed to misspell "Beidou", their national navigation system...
They sure ask for a lot of money, but they're not spending any on their own website.
https://www.vertu.com/products/metavertu-himalaya-alligator-leather-18k-gold-diamonds
Vertu phones basically focus on a very specific demographic - assholes with more money than sense. Russian oligarchs and suchlike who'll pay 40 grand for a mediocre smart phone just because it comes in a fancy case. The sort who are so shallow and insecure about their wealth they think people are only impressed if they show it off by buying crap like this.
"Dear phone owner ... Sort your priorities"
The people who buy these phones have ..... their priority is ME !!!
They are unable to handle the concept of 'other than I'.
Usually, they have children BUT this does not alter their focus and they breed yet another generation of self-focused people.
what a complete rip off, I bet it'll sell to those influencer idiots on socials.
the old Vertu factory is now an Aldi and Home Bargains, I assume the original Vertu engineers are all gainfully employed with legitimate companies.
Unless it was designed and made in the UK, I'd not even trust this device with details of where my dogs favourite place to take a dump is.
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