Luxury phone company Vertu is apparently back from the great beyond, and they really should have stayed. The company is launching a new bespoke line of luxury phones targeting autocrats and dictators. Besides luxury materials, the company combines the worst internet tendencies along with complete technological ineptitude into a single device, the METAVERTU.
Yes, Vertu capitalized it, and that’s the last time I will be capitalizing this phone’s name.
Vertu used to sell luxury candy bar phones like the Vertu Constellation before we all realized we would vastly prefer a $600 iPhone to any phone that costs $14,000 and lacks a real Web browser. Now, the company is selling what appears to be a reshelled ZTE Nubia Z40 Pro. At least, the specs according to our friends at GSMArena match up pretty closely with that phone.
You can get a variety of materials, including Himalayan alligator, which sounds endangered, and diamonds, a completely noncontroversial inclusion. They have leather and gold and other fine adornments, but there is no way I’m going to be the mouthpiece for the catalogue for this utter garbage. Whatever terribly expensive material you want your phone made from, Vertu makes it.
How could they make this phone any worse? Web 3.0. Yes, the Metavertu somehow embraces all that is great and holy in NFTs, the Blockchain, and every other scam the internet has cooked up in the last five years. Etherium is involved. I’m not telling you more, because I don’t care and I don’t really trust blockchain currency.
To quote Vertu’s release: “The bespoke VERTU CNCOS operating system is a ‘5-dimensional integrated ecosystem,’ combining chips, smart terminals, blockchain, OS and services,” which is maybe one of the most frightening sentences I’ve read in a phone announcement. It fairly diagrams the ways the company will try to drain its customers, including crypto currency, storefronts, and subscription plans.
The rest of the announcement reads like a company that has no idea what the different phone parts do. The phone can come equipped with up to 18G [sic] RAM and 1T ROM. We’re not sure why it needs so much read-only memory, but some storage would be preferable.
There is a “triple camera system with high quality lens.” One lens? For three cameras? Later, it goes on to say “Metavertu [capitalized there, NOT here] is equipped with an upgraded 64-megapixel lens,” which would be novel, as megapixels usually divide the sensor, not the lens.
I could detail the other specs, but it feels dirty to enthuse over this phone, even slightly. Go read about the ZTE Nubia Z40 Pro instead, then pick up one of those phones for a tiny fraction of the cost. Feel good about yourself.
Would you buy a $40,000 phone from a company that doesn’t know the sensor has megapixels, not the lens? Would you trust them with your Himalayan alligator?
I’m sure this is the right phone for someone, but there is no chance I am adding this monstrosity to our list of best smartphones, ever. I mean, I couldn’t add a phone to the list without a proper review. Maybe if the company sent me a review unit, I would reconsider.
