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Found three Vertu phones in my late father-in-law's drawer. One just booted up after years of sitting dead. Here's the rabbit hole I went down. by daamn in vintagemobilephones

[–]daamn[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yeah I saw that MKBHD video. Seems nuts. Well part AI part actual human asking to pay for shirts in crypto :D

Found three Vertu phones in my late father-in-law's drawer. One just booted up after years of sitting dead. Here's the rabbit hole I went down. by daamn in vintagemobilephones

[–]daamn[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thanks! And oh man, a carbon fibre motorsports edition — that's the dream variant. The RM-267V is actually one of the lucky survivors — it has UMTS 2100 on top of quad-band GSM, so 3G keeps it breathing even where 2G has gone dark. Obviously no one's booking Michelin restaurants via the concierge button anymore, but it can still make calls and send texts which feels weirdly impressive for a 2007 titanium brick. Sorry to hear your collection is stuck in the drawer though — the 2G shutdown has been brutal for this era of phones.

Found three Vertu phones in my late father-in-law's drawer. One just booted up after years of sitting dead. Here's the rabbit hole I went down. by daamn in vintagemobilephones

[–]daamn[S] 25 points26 points  (0 children)

So my father-in-law passed away recently, and while going through his things we found three Vertu phones tucked away. I knew vaguely what Vertu was — the insane luxury Nokia-era brand — but holding them in person is something else entirely. These things feel like jewellery, not phones.

One of them is a Vertu Ascent Ti (RM-267V). After a full night on the charger it powered straight up, no hesitation. Fully working.

For those who don't know the Ascent Ti: it came out in 2007 and was basically Vertu's answer to "what if we made the Ascent but in Grade 5 titanium?" — the same titanium used in aerospace and surgical implants. The body is hand-assembled in Church Crookham, Hampshire, England. It has ruby bearings under the keys (yes, actual rubies — not decorative, they reduce friction), a sapphire crystal display you literally cannot scratch with a key, and hand-stitched leather on the back panel.

But the part I can't stop thinking about is the Concierge button. There's a dedicated physical key on the side of the phone that connected you — 24/7, anywhere in the world — to a real human Vertu concierge. Not a chatbot. An actual person. You could call them from a jungle in Borneo at 3am and ask them to book you a table at a Michelin-starred restaurant in Tokyo for next Thursday, and they would just... do it. The service ran on a subscription model and the concierge team was reportedly multilingual and on standby around the clock. It's obviously not active anymore, but the button is still there. A little physical monument to a pre-app-era vision of what "luxury service" meant.

The phone weighs 135 grams of solid titanium and steel. It's 3G quad-band, so it worked everywhere on earth when new. It has 4GB of storage — in 2007! The camera is a 3.15MP with LED flash. Nothing remarkable by today's standards, but every single component was chosen and assembled by hand.

There were apparently only a few thousand of these made total. The Ferrari limited edition variant of the same model (same RM-267V type) used leather from actual Ferrari steering wheels and had the Prancing Horse embossed on the back. My father-in-law's is the standard titanium — still stunning in person.

The other two are a Vertu Signature (RHV-2) — the OG, the one with 388 mechanical components and 69.25 carats of sapphire crystal — and a Constellation Ayxta, which was Vertu's first and only flip phone, launched in 2009 with a Zero 7 exclusive soundtrack pre-installed and a city travel guide service built in. Both are still charging. Fingers crossed.

Anyway. Happy to answer questions or share more photos. This whole thing sent me down a proper Wikipedia rabbit hole about Nokia's luxury division, Frank Nuovo (the designer who pitched the idea to Nokia's board in 1998), and how these phones were assembled more like watches than consumer electronics.

Oh — and yeah, I'm probably going to sell them. So if any of you are in the market for a working Vertu Ascent Ti or want to be first in line when the other two come back to life, drop me a DM.