Vertu has always been the brand synonymous with wealthy people that are willing to spend thousands of dollars for a phone. In the past, Vertu was considered to be the pinnacle of what a phone could be, but under Nokia’s lack of vision, the brand failed to adapt to the needs of customers and many Vertu customers ended up going for iPhones. Now that Vertu has severed themselves from Nokia for long enough (about a year) they have the ability to innovate and do the right thing for their customers. In the past few years, Vertu was stuck using the antiquated Symbian operating system and many people that would have wanted to own one of these simply couldn’t bring themselves to do so. Even with Vertu’s legendary customer service, many people simply could not bring themselves to buy a Vertu phone running Symbian. However, in the last year or two, they’ve started to experiment with custom Android interfaces and the Android OS.
Now, Vertu has released their latest and greatest offering to their customers. This new phone is the Vertu Constellation, the follow-up to Vertu’s $9600 TI a phone made of grade 5 titanium. The Constellation and TI internally have very similar specifications, however the Constellation is designed to broaden Vertu’s appeal with a more affordable, but equally as quality built device also using Android. The TI comes with Android 4.0, while the Constellation ships with Android 4.2.2. The Constellation also has a higher resolution 1280×720, 4.3" display, while the TI is a 3.7" display with a measly resolution of 800×480. This is a clear recognition of the need for consumers to have larger touch displays, even in the ultra-high-end. They’ve also upgraded the camera to a 13 MP camera, up from the TI’s 8 MP camera.
The Constellation also sports 32GB of internal memory standard, while the TI comes standard with 64GB. However, the real dealbreaker for the TI comes by the way of the battery. The TI does not actually state a battery size, in fact they only quote Talk time of 7 hours and standby time of 200 hours, which when compared to the Constellation’s 1800 mAh battery seems very small. How do we know this? Because Vertu quotes the Constellation’s talk time as 14 hours and standby time at 4000 hours. Either the Vertu TI was a power hog, or they had a tiny battery.
Also, the banding for the Vertu Constellation’s modem is pretty impressive, but a bit disappointing that it does not support LTE. Currently, the Constellation supports Quadband GSM 850/900/1800/1900 MHz WCDMA Bands I, II, IV, V, VIII HSPA+, Cat24, 42Mb/s Downlink, Cat6 5.76Mb/s Uplink WLAN 802.11 a,b,g, n, inc. WAPI for PRC. Admittedly, considering that most of the world doesn’t have LTE yet, it makes sense for the global market that they are trying to target. But, at the same time, most of the people that can afford these devices will likely find themselves in metropolitan cities that do have LTE.
Overall, the Constellation is a clear recognition by the company of what’s important to consumers nowadays and they know that if they pay attention, they will be able to get a lot of people to look at their devices. For those looking to get one of their own Constellation Vertu phones, it’ll set you back about $6,700. Just the price of about ten iPhone 5S 16GB models.
