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DISTRO
03.08.13
ENTER
HANDS-ON
VERTU TI
PRICE:
$9,600-$19,900
AVAILABILITY:
NOW AVAILABLE
THE BREAKDOWN:
VERTU’S LATEST
LUXURY HANDSET
MAKES THE JUMP
TO ANDROID WITH
A SAPPHIRE
CRYSTAL DISPLAY.
Click on
product
names to
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stories
As with other Vertu luxury handsets,
the TI is the result of days of handcrafting
inside a 1,000-strong factory
based in England. Even the screen’s sapphire
crystal takes two to three weeks to
grow from a seed crystal, and the yield
is only at about 70 percent; but the result
is a screen that’s four times stronger
than the glass used by many other
smartphones. The phone’s hand-polished
Grade 5 titanium alloy body provides a
structure that shares similar strength and
feel with stainless steel, but is about 30
percent lighter and a lot more expensive.
The TI carries many signature features of
Vertu devices: the black ceramic ear pillow
and buttons, the Vertu ruby key at
the top of the left side, the ruby bearings
underneath the buttons, the leather or alligator-skin
accents and the watch screws
dotted around the phone.
On the software side, there wasn’t
much to fault with the near-vanilla Android
4.0.4 — it ran smoothly on top of
Qualcomm’s 1.7GHz dual-core Snapdragon
S4 MSM8260A. The only UI
customizations from Vertu are the odd
visual elements and the consistently
minimalistic icons for the native apps.
But there’s also the Vertu services app
that can be toggled using the Vertu ruby
key on the left side of the phone, and
here you have three options: Vertu Life
(which curates articles and exclusive
event suggestions based on the user’s
passions and location), Vertu Concierge
(a 24/7 independent personal assistance
service; basic level is free for the
first year, £1,850 or about $2,800 per
year afterwards) and Vertu Certainty
(a host of security-related services and
remote technical assistance).