Tonino Lamborghini's 88 Tauri phone is leather, steel... and $6,300
Having a lot of money entitles you to buy expensive things, but fast cars or Bel Air mansions aren't the only ways you can showcase your wealth. Companies like Vertu and Tonino Lamborghini make smartphones for people with -- let's be honest -- more money than sense, and because I have neither, industry events are my only opportunities to check them out. And it's at just such an event that I've come across Tonino Lamborghini's latest smartphone, the 88 Tauri. Crafted from calfskin leather and "automotive-grade" stainless steel, it's big, heavy and basically exactly what you'd expect a $6,300 status symbol to be. This particular model, as you can see, is a blue and gold number, but there are three finishes of metal and five colors of cowskin to choose from. But why limit yourself? Might as well get one of each.
While no phone should really be this expensive, that's basically the whole point: You buy one because you can. There's an exclusivity factor here, too. Only 1,947 of each type of metal/leather combination exist, and for a rather cheesy reason, as Antonio "Tonino" Lamborghini himself was born in 1947. At least you get bang for your buck, if you can really use that phrase here, in terms of specs. The 88 Tauri sports a 5-inch (1080p) display, a 20-megapixel main camera, an 8-megapixel selfie shooter, a 3,400mAh battery, 64GB of internal storage, a quad-core 2.3GHz Snapdragon 801 processor, 3GB of RAM and dual LTE SIM functionality. Not to mention the 13 exclusive ringtones created by "famed disc jockey and producer DJ Ravin." Those have gotta be worth a couple of grand alone, surely?