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Gresso's Grand Premiere: an Avantgarde phone with a behind-the-times OS and a $50,000 price tag
Whenever Gresso's not crafting expensive new threads for iDevices, the company makes its own featurephones from the finest materials mother nature has to offer. The new Grand Premiere is the latest from the company's Avantgarde collection and carries on this incongruous tradition. Its frame and keys are made from more than five ounces of 18-carat gold, with numbers and letters laser-etched on its sapphire crystal skin. We don't know the internals of the 12mm-thin candybar, but we do know it's running Symbian S40 and is probably packing anemic hardware like other Gressos we've seen -- you're paying for exclusivity and the shiny stuff, not benchmarking abilities, after all. Only 30 Grand Premiere's will be made at $50,000 pop, so all you conspicuous consumers with money to burn better move fast. Wouldn't want to be the only luddite at the yacht club without luxury handset, would you?
Nokia Oro is covered with 18ct gold on the outside, tinged with Symbian regret inside
Nokia has just unveiled a strange new beast of a smartphone. Internally, it's your good old C7 -- 3.5-inch AMOLED screen, 720p video recording, 8 megapixel camera, a pentaband radio, and Symbian as your zombie OS -- but externally it's taken on a lick of gold paint and a rear cover made of real leather. The price for a phone built quite so luxuriously is said to be upwards of €800 ($1,126) before taxes and subsidies and launch is expected in Q3 in select countries across Europe and Asia. Russia in particular is called out as a successful market for such "premium" phones, with Nokia's Gabriel Speratti, General Manager for its operations in the country, explaining that: "We have a large number of users who are looking for products with a build quality and superior materials that attest to their success and social standing. In some areas, possession of such premium products is the passport to being taken seriously." We have to agree, owning a phone like this will certainly have an effect on your social life, we're just not so sure it'll be a positive one.
TAG Heuer Merediist GMT keeps your Monte Carlo arrivals on time
For all its luxurious sapphire crystal glass and genuine alligator skin, the TAG Heuer Meridiist has always struggled to keep up with the times -- but don't expect that two megapixel camera or 1.9-inch QVGA screen to change in the handset's latest iteration. No, the Merediist GMT's only new feature is -- you guessed it -- to literally keep track of Greenwich Mean Time. "Switch between home time and destination time," a flashy new ad teases, as a pair of (presumably) filthy rich individuals take the TAG Heuer Tesla for a cross-country drive. We're not quite sure how one originally forgets about world time with 150 years of watchmaking experience under one's belt, but at least the company has pledged to include the function in all future $4000+ models.
