£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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only 1gb ram?? cheaper phones have 2gb by Anonymous Coward · 2013-02-12 05:25 · Score: 4, Insightful

only 1gb ram?? cheaper phones have 2gb
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 sharkytm · 2013-02-12 05:32 · Score: 4, Informative
  
  b-b-b-b-b-but it wouldn't be a LUXURY BRAND (R)(C). Heck, most of a Lexus is Toyota, Acura-Honda, Infiniti-Nissan. Wealthy ( and more importantly)Image-conscious people don't care about functionality, they care about appearances. Plain and simple.
2. Re:Why do these phones always suck? by Improv · 2013-02-12 05:32 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  The kind of person who would waste that kind of money on a phone merits a phone that sucks.
  
  --
  For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. Re:Why do these phones always suck? by afgam28 · 2013-02-12 06:23 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  Not really. Lexus cars are always better spec'd than their Toyota counterparts. Same goes for Acura and Infiniti. The specs might not go up linearly with the price, but they are objectively better cars.
  Vertu's phones on the other hand are not as good as the iPhone and a lot of Android phones.
  The only thing that might justify Vertu's prices are the luxury services that come with the phone (Vertu Concierge), but forcing their customers to use such a crappy handset is a serious drawback that brands like Lexus do not have.
You're not supposed to use it by Overzeetop · 2013-02-12 05:29 · Score: 4, Insightful

You're supposed to be seen with it. To be honest, I'm surprised they didn't buy an Iphone and re-case it from scratch. The market is clearly brand conscious people who get all hot and bothered about overpaying for mediocre performance. How does that not scream Apple?

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Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
1. Re:You're not supposed to use it by acariquara · 2013-02-12 05:34 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  Because iPhones actually perform well?
  
  --
  Dear aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all
2. Re:You're not supposed to use it by Anonymous Coward · 2013-02-12 05:41 · Score: 4, Funny
  
  [Citation needed]
3. Re:You're not supposed to use it by amicusNYCL · 2013-02-12 06:34 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  How exactly do you expect them to get a license to use iOS? Apple doesn't give those out, their options are Android or Windows Phone. Of course they're going to choose Android.
  
  --
  "Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
4. Re:You're not supposed to use it by greenfruitsalad · 2013-02-12 07:52 · Score: 4, Funny
  
  Because iPhones actually perform well?
5. 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();
For $10K, don't give me a 1.5 year old OS. by Andy+Prough · 2013-02-12 05:32 · Score: 3, Insightful

Why Ice Cream Sandwich? 4.2 has more features.
Re:Apps by h4rr4r · 2013-02-12 05:37 · Score: 5, Informative

All the major apps? Yeah, right. Even top games are not available. Temple Run and the like. Hell they had to bribe Rovio to bring angry birds over.
What exactly does your magic phone do out of the box the others don't?
Considering the desktop OS in 2013 still does not support ipsec vpn out of the box I have a hard time imagining what they added to WinPhone.
Vertitude by Empiric · 2013-02-12 05:38 · Score: 5, Funny

Apple should now officially start worrying: Android has cracked a market segment with the stratospheric level of pretentiousness and narcissism that Steve Jobs can now only haunt wistfully from his new no-margin domain.

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~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
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.
Ten Grand for a Phone? by Westwood0720 · 2013-02-12 06:59 · Score: 3, Funny

I could buy 20 of my pickup trucks for that much. I must be out of touch with reality.