It's somewhat amusing to see manufacturers of luxury gadgets still not getting it that we're in mid-recession here. But, as long as they're still standing, and more or less rich people still buy their stuff, who cares, right? Besides, these kind of products always come with some sort of extravagance or exaggeration in one feature or another (mainly design) so we can at least look at them and shake our heads in wonder.

The Constellation Pure Collection from Vertu – no, we're talking about mobile phones, not fur coats – is not as blindingly lavish as some other gadgets covered in Swarovksi crystals or other flamboyant materials. Instead, they went with the “manually-crafted-after-long-years-of-research-blah-blah” line.

Plastic is abhorrent to the Vertu people, so they used ceramic – and they say they crafted each part of the Pure Collection mobile separately. Consequently, the structure of this phone should be as seamless as some ancient Mayan wall – you know, the ones with those heavy bricks so precisely laid on top of each other. Of course, the coloring had to have that special “high gloss finish.”

There are two different models available, white and black. Or, in luxury product lingo, Pure Silver and Pure Black. If some intrepid Starfleet scouting party boarded a Vertu spaceship, found one of these gadgets and ran a tricorder scan on them, it would find out the following: the Pure Silver is made of polished steel, has a ceramic keyboard and a leather back; the Pure Black has some serious amounts of PVD treated steel in its composition, and again, ceramic keyboard and leather back. Oh, and the leather comes from Italy, from Italian calves to be more exact. Now, isn't that adorable?

Best hurry to buy one of these marvels, Vertu made only 2500 of them.  


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