£6700 Phone Uses Android Instead of Windows

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£6700 Phone Uses Android Instead of Windows

Posted by timothy on Tuesday February 12, 2013 @05:22AM from the fool-money-separator dept.

judgecorp writes "Vertu, the luxury phone maker formerly owned by Nokia, has chosen Android over Windows Phone for its new £6700 Vertu Ti device. The bling brand is no longer part of Nokia, so is free to shun Windows Phone — apparently because there are not enough apps there for Vertu's rich customers." Previous Vertu handsets used Symbian. Note: £6700 is just over 10,000 USD.

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Why do these phones always suck? by h4rr4r · 2013-02-12 05:29 · Score: 5, Interesting

I get it they are to show off how rich you are, but seems like for $10k I would want something a little better specced.
Why do they then always suck? You could get a real top of the line phone and have a custom solid gold body made for it for less and have a better device.
1. Re:Why do these phones always suck? by h4rr4r · 2013-02-12 05:40 · Score: 3, Interesting
  
  That does not explain why they suck though. They could charge $12k and make it a decent device.
2. Re:Why do these phones always suck? by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · 2013-02-12 05:45 · Score: 3, Interesting
  
  I get it they are to show off how rich you are, but seems like for $10k I would want something a little better specced.
  Why do they then always suck? You could get a real top of the line phone and have a custom solid gold body made for it for less and have a better device.
  Tech is a pretty brutal market to do 'luxury' goods in. R&D and design costs are extremely high, while manufacturing is (relatively) cheap per unit. So, the guy who is stamping out several million pieces of consumer shit can spend more on making the software not suck and the case(while possibly plastic) elegantly designed than the guy stamping out 1,000 'luxury' devices. It doesn't help that phones are harshly power constrained, so you can't even make something 'better' by splurging on fancy silicon(at least with a desktop, you could shove the fastest i7 that Intel makes and several times as much RAM as the customer could ever need into the chassis as a value-add). The thermal envelope and battery size are so small that mass-market junk, made in huge volume on refined processes, will offer a better experience than any custom or super-overclocked, or 'just-plain-excessive-amounts-of-RAM' configuration would.
  This still doesn't explain why 'Vertu' hardware is actively worse than generic Nexus gear, since they could probably just buy Nexus hardware at retail and rip the case off for less money than designing their own hardware; but tech in general is pretty hard to do 'luxury' in.
3. Re:Why do these phones always suck? by Graydyn+Young · 2013-02-12 06:07 · Score: 3, Interesting
  
  The great thing about Vertu Ti is, unlike Lexus, it's not even a widely recognized brand. So when you're showing off you're fancy new phone and say "It's an authentic Vertu Ti!" nobody is even going to know what you're talking about.
For that much money... by jonadab · 2013-02-12 05:39 · Score: 3, Interesting

For that much money, I'd think these rich customers could hire a team of engineers to design a custom phone just for them, with their name spelled out in the actual circuitry as well as embossed on the case, which could be custom-ergonomized to fit perfectly in their personal hand.

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Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
Re:You're not supposed to use it by rtfa-troll · 2013-02-12 09:08 · Score: 5, Interesting

Key features of this are things like a sapphire display which is much better than and much much more expensive than gorilla glass. The other thing is the "I am rich" button - to call your conceierge. This is to an iPhone as an iPhone is to a really cheap Android phone. Which is to say, on a cheap Android phone you will get a bunch of features that the iPhone doesn't have, such as the ability to side load applications, but your iPhone geek will just say "don't want" and point at his better display. This is the reason why top end Android phones devices to outclass the iPhone on display technology. Everybody knows the iPhone fans have to grit their teeth as they pretend not to care.
The other thing is that this is very clearly saying that their customers are wanting something that integrates with their surroundings properly. "You need to be part of an ecosystem," is the key quote in the BBC article in explaining why they avoided WP8. Coming from a former Nokia person, and almost directly a quote from Steven Elop on why they chose Windows, I think that could be a sign that Windows Phone will be abandoned sooner rather than later. Possibly with Elop going with it. It's certainly a pretty direct hint to the board members of his former employer.

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=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();