£6700 Phone Uses Android Instead of Windows 142
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.
only 1gb ram?? cheaper phones have 2gb (Score:4, Insightful)
only 1gb ram?? cheaper phones have 2gb
You're not supposed to use it (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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Because iPhones actually perform well?
Re:You're not supposed to use it (Score:4, Funny)
[Citation needed]
Re:You're not supposed to use it (Score:5, Funny)
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Because iPhones actually perform well?
No, no they dont. You did ask the question.
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Isn't that just an iPhone and the I am rich app?
Re:You're not supposed to use it (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 [bbc.co.uk] 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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Its all about position. Apple product is just to affordable for these people. Joe public can get an iPhone if he wants one. Might not be the best use of his money but its option for him. These people want to have something you and I just can't touch, or can't touch without make other sacrifices that would make us appear foolish ( you can't roll up in your 12 year old rust bucket and look cool even if you are holding $7000 cell phone to your head ).
I was once out to lunch with my grandfather at the club
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( you can't roll up in your 12 year old rust bucket and look cool even if you are holding $7000 cell phone to your head ).
To me, any dick with a seven grand tacky jewel-encrusted phone will always be a tryhard asswipe, and never, ever cool. But each to their own.
Re:You're not supposed to use it (Score:4, 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.
Android Market Share Reached 75% .. (Score:2)
"the Android operating system was found on three out of every four smartphones shipped during the third quarter of 2012". link [techcrunch.com]
That was my first thought. (Score:3)
When you're using titanium for the case and sapphire for the screen, you cant spring for a 2GB chip instead of 1GB? Seriously?
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Amount of RAM has a significant effect on battery life. It's not just a cost issue.
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Do you have data sheets or something to support that? From everything I've seen, that would be peanuts compared to the screen.
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That's not what I said. There's a cost-benefit tradeoff here. What is the benefit in performance that the extra RAM gives versus the cost of the chip and the power drain? That's why I asked for data sheets. Let's calculate just how many extra amp-hours we'd be drawing here.
Note, again, that they're using a titanium case with a sapphire screen. This thing, as TFA sa
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When you're using titanium for the case and sapphire for the screen, you cant spring for a 2GB chip instead of 1GB? Seriously?
Performance is not their priority. Cachet is.
Why do these phones always suck? (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.
Re:Why do these phones always suck? (Score:4, Informative)
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That's what I was thinking. It's so ridiculously luxurious that nobody's ever heard of it. This reminds me of the coffee that comes from beans with have been through the digestive system of a civet [wikipedia.org]. Paying absurd prices for stuff that isn't even better than the cheaper stuff.
I was given some civet coffee. It is better than the cheap stuff. It just isn't 40 times better.
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I'm sure that the people who hang out in those circles know perfectly well what it is.
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It doesn't need to be recognised. It looks expensive, and the fact that you won something that other people haven;t even heard of is itself a status symbol.
It's basically the ultimate hipster phone.
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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.
"It's an authentic Vertu Ti!"
"Never heard of it."
"I'm not surprised. It's very exclusive."
Sort of the rich equivalent of being a hipster.
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The problem is that once such a beast is designed and built, it's relatively easy to build the factory to stamp them out by the millions, and that's where the real profits are. The only players big enough to pull that off are too big to care about the few rich fools who would pay that kind of markup. Until the rate of technological progress slows, it will be the masses that are closest to the bleeding edge, and any $10,000 phone will either be a prototype on it's way to market (and subject to so many NDA'
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As you are posting as anon I cannot tell if you are a billionaire or not, but I would say for it to sell in the luxury market it will need:
1: any version of android, as long as it has a stunning wallpaper
2: a processor of some sort
3: at least enough memory to run Facebook and Youtube, possibly Angry Birds
4: no card storage
5: enough on-board to copy an iPod worth of contents
6: a colour screen
7: a stunning design case
8: ok battery life
9: a copy of something like Cerberus pre-installed
10: good enough antenna
It
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A friend of mine drives a Ferrari, it's an embarrassingly efficient chick magnet, the on board computer screen is crap, but you know what, nobody cares ...
The vertu owner is happy to have a very good looking phone and concierge service, the technology will be obsolete in any case because the economics of small run productions implies a longer sales life.
The electronics have just to be "good enough", and with android they have all the toy apps everybody has so they will not be dissed by somebody telling them
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Maybach owners don't drive them, they get driven in them.
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Can someone explain this with a car analogy?
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I believe it is...
you are so rich that the trunk of the car is too small to fit all your bags of money. so you need to spend extra money for the same car that everyone else is buying, so the car maker graciously put a fancy logo on it indicating they would allow you to pay more for that particular model.
Re:Why do these phones always suck? (Score:5, 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.
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saphire screen (Score:2)
It would totally rock to have a saphire screen. No need to worry about screen protectors.
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Have you never heard of gorilla glass? it's almost as good and a metric fuckton cheaper.
Emphasis mine. Going from 99.9% to 99.99% costs a metric fuckton less than going from 99.99% to 99.999%.
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In most of the world, there *are* no Lexus/Acura/Infiniti cars. Those badges are an exclusively American thing; in the rest of the world, those better-equipped models are sold as Toyotas, Hondas, and Nissans.
So yes, in the USA, a Lexus is generally better spec'ed - but that is just because they peel the Toyota badges off the nice ones when they arrive in the States and slap on Lexus ones. It isn't because of any sort of different engineering - all of the base components are identical.
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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.
Not really,
The biggest differences are normally in the Interior (I.E. Leather seats as standard on a Lexus R300 and optional on a Toyota Aurion). With the other brands you mentioned, these seem to be American specific. The Infinity G37 in Asia and Europe is sold as the Nissan Skyline 350/370GT and Australia as the Nissan Skyline 350/370z. The Acura cars are sold as Honda in other parts of the world. I own a Honda Integra Type S (DC5S) which is known as the Acura RSX Type S in north and south America. The
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I don't think that Lexus is a scam on the same level as Vertu. Bad value? Maybe. But Lexus vehicles are always at least as good as their Toyota counterparts.
Who cares if an Integra is the same car as an RSX? They're both great cars I'd be perfectly happy with either. The point is that the RSX is not worse than the Integra. The same cannot be said about a Vertu and an iPhone - the "luxury" Vertu is an inferior product.
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Who cares if an Integra is the same car as an RSX? They're both great cars I'd be perfectly happy with either. The point is that the RSX is not worse than the Integra.
The points over here.
Hi.
You seem to have missed it.
The reason the Honda Integra was not sold as the Honda Integra in the US is that Honda decided they could ask for a higher price tag under the Acura brand (same with the Honda Accord and Acura TL). They are exactly the same car with the same K20 engine made in the same factory in Suzuka, Japan. Only the badge is different.
As a side note, I own one (Honda badging as I live in Australia) and they are awesome cars.
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Which is to say, car manufacturers under-spec their non-luxury brands so that they can justify the higher prices of their luxury brands.
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That is for cars, where those features actually cost a lot to manufacture. For cell phones there are no features that could raise the price to $10,000. Diamonds glued to the case aren't functional, so this excludes decoration.
Re:Why do these phones always suck? (Score:5, Insightful)
The kind of person who would waste that kind of money on a phone merits a phone that sucks.
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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.
Exactly. YOU would want something a little better specced.
But no, you very clearly DON'T get that it's to show off how rich you are if you're then asking why they always suck and suggesting what is, for all intents and purposes, a no-name custom knockoff instead of a recognized brand name that rich people can point to in front of their rich friends they wish to impress (and poor friends they wish to intimidate), grunt, and have the point understood without further explanation that doesn't sate their magpie
Re:Why do these phones always suck? (Score:4, Interesting)
That does not explain why they suck though. They could charge $12k and make it a decent device.
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No they could not. The problem is development time. When they started the development they most likely started with state of the art available hardware, but it take them so long to develop and release a phone, that its performance will be meh once they release them.
And it take them so long because their development staff is extreamly small, compared to Samsung, HTC and Apple.
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They did not have to do any of that.
You can call an OEM up right now and order X devices built for you. Hell make your own chassis for it even, or glass. Google does this with the Nexus Line. The Nexus 4 is pretty much an LG Optimus.
Re:Why do these phones always suck? (Score:4, 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.
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Why not do a Lexus?
Just get a big boy to provide you with everything done and you can make a fancy body for it?
Hell why not do what Google does with the Nexus line? Work with one of the big players to do the whole thing for you but put your branding on it.
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That's the part I don't understand: it makes sense that 'luxury' electronics can't actually afford to be much better than much more modestly priced consumer gear; but it is quite mysterious why they are actively worse when the same people who OEM the good stuff would be more than happy to sell you the same guts that you can then cover with artisinal hand-tanned tiger foreskin leather or gold-encrusted ivory or whatever.
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I don't think a reseller will be allowed to buy another brand retail, put the internals into a new cover, and pass it off as their own phone. That would be inviting a law suit pretty quickly.
Phillip.
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Oh, you wouldn't literally do it that way, you'd work with the OEM to do a re-badge with your preferred changes(just as the Nexus itself does, though on a much larger scale). My intention was just to note that, given the profit margins that would allow you to do something as inefficient as 'purchase-at-retail-and-tear-up', you really should be able to OEM a top-end device to wrap in bling.
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From the article, the phone comes with concierge services – i.e. you hit a call button and can get a real person on the phone – which – if I had to guess – would be why it is so expensive.
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A screen made from sapphire will also add to the bill. I doubt the leather really costs that much, but a sapphire screen can't be cheap.
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I doubt it. Sapphire crystals (the glass bit) are pretty common in even relatively cheap watches. It's synthetic sapphire, probably not much more than £50 for a screen that size.
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It's not cheap, no, but not so expensive that it would add (much) to justify a 10,000 price tag. Quality watches have sapphire glass because it's very scratch resistant, but you can get such watches for as low as 300-400 bucks street price (and sometimes get a smokin' deal for considerably less). It's also (almost?) always a synthetic sapphire.
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Why do they then always suck? You could get a real top of the line phone
Not sure if you're an Apple Fanbois angling for sentiment among the brethren, or largely just annoyed by the design of the phone but perhaps you can find some solace in knowing they only sell (FTFA) around 320,000 of these a year. That percentage isn't even mentionable in comparison to the number of iOS devices in the US, or even Android devices globally.
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I don't think you've priced gold recently.
P.S.: Solid gold wouldn't work as a case. It's too soft. You need to alloy in some copper or something to make it harder. 24K gold might work, though. It seems pretty hard in a ring, but I've never seen a large sheet of it, so I don't really know if it's strong enough.
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When have you seen a 24Kt gold ring? Answer, you haven't. 18Kt perhaps, but not 24Kt. As you say, it's too soft. Perhaps you might have seen jewelery with 24Kt plating.
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You're probably right. I don't follow jewlery, so I probably got two differnt product confused.
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You may have overlooked one important spec that is missing from other smartphones:
Not assembled in China.
You ask: "Why a $10000 phone!?!?" (Score:1)
Answer: Because some people think status symbols will some day feed their empty souls.
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Apps (Score:1, Troll)
This was nowhere in the article, so I have to assume that the summary writer hasn't used a Windows Phone. Windows Phones don't need access to a bazillion apps, usually, because the phones do so much more out of the box than the other two big competitors. But, all of the major apps are certainly available. I guess if you need 500 different fart apps, then the Windows Phone may not be for you. I only counted about 30 in the W
Re:Apps (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.
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The other phones have that built in as well. Often the replacement applications are just better or the users preference. Does winphone have skype working properly yet? Meaning it can fireup the app when a call comes in? I know that was a no go with 7.5.
You must not be using your device very often. I often work from mine, yes ssh on a 4 inch screen is not great but better than nothing.
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You really should read the reviews section. Most of the comments were about how it doesn't work in WP8.
On the other hand, Tokenshell/WP [wpcentral.com] appears to work.
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modded up - why the fuck?
there's a bunch of apps you can't do on wp. it's not the number of apps, it's about what they can do. and out of the box wp does shit all nothing, it's just that you can't do add-on features as much.
and perhaps that's why they went with android. other reasons: choosing any hw they happen to want to run it, choosing any resolution they want, not being tied to ms ties for camera drivers, customizing the sw any way they want..
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What "so much more out of the box" does a Windows Phone do that the others don't?
You're making a bold claim with nothing to support it, and I'm genuinely curious to know if that's true. I've certainly never heard of anything those phones do that Android and Apple can't do.
My guess is it does the exact same thing as other phones for the most part.
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I bought a Windows Phone. I really wanted to like it.
I LOVED the interface, I really think live tiles are great for phones (don't get me started on how much they suck for Windows).
All that said, when I got an iPhone 5 after having the Windows phone, I was happy to have the apps back.
Very short list of apps I could not get on Windows Phone that are not fart apps & I use often:
Glympse (WP wouldn't run in the background)
Pandora
Dish Network (Streaming from my DVR at home)
Fitbit
Starbucks
Flickr
Swiss Trains ap
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apparently because there are not enough apps there for Vertu's rich customers.
This was nowhere in the article, so I have to assume that the summary writer hasn't used a Windows Phone. Windows Phones don't need access to a bazillion apps, usually, because the phones do so much more out of the box than the other two big competitors. But, all of the major apps are certainly available. I guess if you need 500 different fart apps, then the Windows Phone may not be for you. I only counted about 30 in the Windows Phone app store.
Wait - are you a WP defender or a BlackBerry defender?!
I get so confused anymore...
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Agreed. The "not enough apps" conversation/excuse is a dumb one. 95% of the apps people are installing never get used. They just sit there for epeen measuring and "just in case I need it". If you disagree I dare you to actually count the number of apps you use in a day.
This is so; so horribly wrong. 99.9% of the time I don't care about having an up to date Stuttgart travel planner app [google.com] in Android. It's the one time that I need it; that I'm late for my plane; that I can't get a taxi. That one time I manage to get my flight because my Android phone knows how to do it for me can be worth more than the entire phone and all the software on it. The magic app which saves you can be a simple ruler application [google.com] which lets you call for the right screw to fix your car. It can
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"My kids having a seizure! Wait, I know! I have an app on my phone that will tell me what to do." - Said no one, ever.
Mock and laugh you may, but when you are trapped by an earthquake in Haiti. [cnn.com] you will wish you shilled for a company that makes proper phones.
For $10K, don't give me a 1.5 year old OS. (Score:4, Insightful)
Saboski (Score:2)
Vertitude (Score:5, Funny)
For that much money... (Score:3, Interesting)
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Im not the target market for these.. (Score:2)
I always thought a Vertu was like the "I Am Rich" [wikipedia.org] app - an easy way to broadcast that you have enough money to purchase expensive frivolous things. As such the cascade of "well, the Galaxy S4 has more RAM...." will also be irrelevant.
I guess I'm just too paranoid - I'd always think of these phones as a big "please rob me" signs, even worse than an iPhone. I guess you'd hire a phone bodyguard when you got one.
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Oh, you proles will just never understand what quality really means. In particular, the sapphire-coated screen is much less likely to scratch when your butler or nubile trophy wife is preparing a line of coke for you.
Glass isn't nearly as bad as plastic; but I probably went through 3 iPhones a week back when I was snorting coke off those...
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but I probably went through 3 iPhones a week back when I was snorting coke off those...
You have a tungsten carbide snorting tube?
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alternate definition (Score:2)
The alternate definition of "nubile" is "sexually attractive young woman".
Choosing Windows would have been more surprising.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Let's see...should we choose: 1) the most widely used handset OS in the world with a huge number of apps and open-source code or 2) a much less popular proprietary system with more limited functionality, a limited number of apps, and proprietary code owned by one of the most overbearing software companies that has ever existed? Decisions...decisions...
As a developer... (Score:3)
...I have a burning urge to repackage my current apps and make a few special for this phone, and charge $599 per app.
WVGA? (Score:2)
Sailfish or Ubuntu OS (Score:2)
10 grand for ICS? (Score:3)
Ten Grand for a Phone? (Score:3, Funny)
Better to get an iPhone with a $10,000 case (Score:2)
You're going to spend $10,000 on a phone that doesn't have a video editor? That can't run C apps? That has viruses (and in fact has more viruses than apps?)
Better to get an iPhone and a $10,000 diamond-encrusted case.
Cheap thanks to Open Source (Score:2)
Black card owners already have a concierge (Score:1)
So having a concierge with the phone is useless.
TEN GRAND?! (Score:1)
how long is the contract to get it FREE?
For people with money and no taste (Score:2)
6700 pounds (Score:2)
If you can afford that for a phone you'll probably want to replace next year you can afford a couple Indian developers to make whatever apps you want.