If you thought Samsung’s $2,000 Galaxy Z Fold 7 is cheap, ugly and only fit for use by peasants with only four or five bedrooms in their house, then luxury-phone maker Vertu has the foldable phone for you. The Alphafold, as the company’s newest device is called, uses materials like calf skin, alligator skin, 24 karat gold and, sure, actual diamonds in its construction — and it starts at a mere $6,880.
Still too cheap and nasty for you? That’s fine, Vertu offers a complete customization service with pricing being “effectively uncapped.” Some of the company’s bespoke projects for the ultrarich have had six figure price tags attached. It sure puts the $800 Motorola Razr to shame.
Alligator skin and real gold? No problem here!
So what do you get for all that money? Well, much of it goes on whatever wild materials you want Vertu to use on your phone. Each unit is made mostly to order and built by hand according to the specifications you’ve requested.
The Alphafold is a book-style foldable, with an 8-inch “crease free” inner display, a 6,500-mAh silicon-carbon battery and a rear camera setup consisting of a 50-megapixel main camera, 5-megapixel telephoto and 50-megapixel ultrawide. Vertu also says the device runs on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Gen 4. It’s not clear at the time of writing exactly which model this is, but either way, it’s a step behind Qualcomm’s current flagship 8 Elite Gen 5.
Disappointed that the specs are kinda… meh? Yeah, me too, but Vertu’s probably rightly assuming that its hyper-wealthy clients will be too busy running their vast empires to want to spend much time taking artistic photos of whatever landscapes they’re being chauffeured through or achieving the best frame rates when playing Genshin Impact.
The camera specs might not be the best around, but they’re likely more than enough for any jet-setting CEO.
To help those underappreciated CEOs achieve their definitely-well-meaning goals, the Alphafold is packed with agentic AI tools. Vertu claims that these tools will not only do things like analyze your company’s data but can even make strategic recommendations.
Unsurprisingly, Vertu is keen to make it clear that the AI will not operate wholly on its own, stating that it “should function as a trusted execution partner for decision-makers, not as an unrestricted autonomous system.” So no need to worry that your phone will decide to sell your company when its stock hits a high or opt to ironically vote you off the executive board because you’ve trusted decision-making to your phone.
There’s a whole load of other business-focused stuff and AI trickery on board, but as someone whose income is somewhat below the threshold of literally any of Vertu’s customers, my interest started to wane once I was done looking at the pictures of the luxury device — just like when I used to read in school.
The big internal screen is the best place to look at your company spreadsheets or whatever it is that business folk do.
Still, I’m genuinely keen to see this thing in the flesh and take an opportunity to see what using such an elite handset is actually like. Then I guess I’ll have to come back down to earth with a bump when I have to return to my disgustingly cheap iPhone 17 Pro like I’m in some kind of Dickensian slum. Gross.
