It’s been more than a year since luxury phone brand Vertu went out of business. But it looks like brand is back from the dead… and so are its expensive smartphones.

The first new phone from the revived company is called the Vertu Aster P and it’s a phone with upper mid-range specs… but premium materials including a titanium frame and leather back cover. The phone is assembled by hand in England and it’s really, really expensive.

The Vertu Aster P is up for pre-order in China from JD.com, where you can reserve one for between ¥35,800 and ¥98,000 (about $5,000 to $14,000).

In terms of specs, this is the sort of phone you’d expect to sell for under $500. It has a Qualcomm Snapdragon 660 processor, a 4.9 inch, 1920 x 1080 pixel AMOLED display, 6GB of RAM and 128GB of storage.

The phone has a 3,200 mAh battery and a USB Type-C port, a 12MP rear camera and a 20MP front-facing camera. It also has dual-band WiFi, Bluetooth 5.0, NFC, and dual SIM support.

But it’s not the specs Vertu is charging extra for. It’s the materials, design, and additional services.

The phone has a sapphire crystal glass display, crocodile and lizard leather, and comes in black, silver, and gold colors — I can’t tell for certain, but I suspect the gold version uses actually gold and not just the color. With a $14,000 price tag, I’d certainly hope so anyway.

If you lift the flap covering the SIM card you’ll also see the etched signature of the person who actually assembled the phone.

While the new Vertu phones are said to be hand put together by hand in England, for some reason they only seem to be available in China for now.

via GizmoChina and itHome

Support Liliputing

Liliputing's primary sources of revenue are advertising and affiliate links (if you click the "Shop" button at the top of the page and buy something on Amazon, for example, we'll get a small commission).

But there are several ways you can support the site directly even if you're using an ad blocker* and hate online shopping.

Contribute to our Patreon campaign

or...

Contribute via PayPal

* If you are using an ad blocker like uBlock Origin and seeing a pop-up message at the bottom of the screen, we have a guide that may help you disable it.

Subscribe to Liliputing via Email

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 9,547 other subscribers

3 replies on “Vertu Aster P is a gaudy phone priced at $5,000 and up”

  1. “The phone is assembled by hand in England”

    But are they guaranteed to be made by the unblemished hands of English artisanal craftsmen in a country cottage workshop rather than some manky foreign immigrant on minimum wage in an industrial estate? Makes all the difference (at such a high retail price) for the snob value, you know old chap.

    ” for some reason they only seem to be available in China for now.”

    The largest market of sufficiently ridiculously wealthy people who will be prepared to buy them, because the cost is immaterial and the purpose of ownership is to outdo each other with their overpriced trinkets, is in the Peoples’ Republic of China.

    Might appeal to some Arab oil production sheikhs and African dictators as well though.

    “I can’t tell for certain”

    Send them an e-mail requesting a sample item in order to write a suitably favorable review article ….

  2. I am guessing they won’t be receiving any security or os updates because they are already perfect?

    /s

Comments are closed.