Vertu Signature Touch (Unlocked) Review

I live in a 9-by-8-foot, windowless room in lower Manhattan, mattress haplessly laid on a bare floor. My diet is dominated by one-dollar slices and five-dollar footlongs. I'm a person of limited means, to say the least. And yet here I sit, holding the $10,800 Vertu Signature Touch, an Android smartphone that is, ounce for ounce, more costly than gold. It's the absolute height of mobile decadence, complete with a personal concierge at your beck and call 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Popping bottles in exclusive clubs, driving Bentleys down the French Riviera, and private mini submarine tours around the Maldives—all these things and more are just a button press away for Vertu owners.  To hold it is at once exhilarating and terrifying. But this phone isn't meant for schlubs like me; this is strictly catering to high-net-worth clientele. For a few fleeting days, though, I got a small glimpse into how the proverbial other half lives. And let me tell you, fellow plebes, they live quite well.

That's not to say I think the Signature Touch is actually worth its weight in gold—far from it. But unlike previous luxury phones from Vertu, the Signature Touch is actually equipped to compete with more common flagships like the Samsung Galaxy S5 ($44.99 at Amazon)  and HTC One (M8) ($450.00 at Amazon) . That means a speedy Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 chip, beautiful 1080p display, and modern Android 4.4 software. It's an excellent phone with impressive perks for the one-percenters who can afford it. The rest of us can keep dreaming.

Design and Features
Handcrafted from exotic materials like hardened titanium, sapphire, calf leather, and polished ceramics, the Signature Touch exudes luxury—at least I think it does. These are all materials I rarely, if ever, encounter, which I guess is the point. In any case, the Signature Touch is supremely well-built and certainly a unique device to behold. The V-shaped accents, leather-clad chin, and ceramic pillow earpiece round out Vertu's signature design cues. Our test unit came with a burgundy calf-leather back, which feels quite supple and has that distinct leather aroma. Vertu offers different finishes, including blue lizard skin, and prices can exceed $20,000 depending on the options you choose. It's an impressive handset, but not appreciably better-looking than the HTC One (M8), at least for my tastes. At 5.71 by 2.72 by 0.42 inches (HWD) and 6.77 ounces, the Signature Touch is on the large and heavy side, but not unwieldy by any means. 

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On the right edge are the Power and Ruby button, the latter of which summons Vertu's suite of services, which I'll get to a little later. The micro USB port sits above the Ruby button, and I'm not really a fan of its side-mounted position. Even more puzzling, though, is the side-mounted headphone jack on the left edge, above the Volume buttons. It makes it pretty awkward to slip the Signature touch into your pocket with headphones attached, unless your headphones have a slim right-angle adapter. A collapsible D-ring around back opens the door for the SIM card slot. Inside you'll find an etching by the craftsman who singlehandedly assembled your Signature Touch. Kudos to C. Davis (hands pictured below, I think), our Vertu artisan. Your stitch work is impeccable.

The 4.7-inch, 1080p display looks exceedingly crisp (473ppi), and it's covered in sapphire instead of your typical Gorilla Glass. Sapphire is one of the hardest materials around, and resists scratches far better than glass, but I noticed it's also an absolute fingerprint and grease magnet. As should be expected with a device this expensive, the display quality is excellent, with a wide viewing angle and solid contrast. There's a pair of Bang & Olufsen-tuned, front-facing speakers below the display that are quite loud. They rival the BoomSound speakers found on the HTC One (M8) and sound pretty great for sharing YouTube videos with friends or playing background music.

Vertu equipped the Signature Touch with wide cellular network compatibility, which seems appropriate given the presumably globe-trotting clientele. There's support for GSM (850/900/1800/1900MHz), WCDMA (Bands I, II, IV, V, VIII), and LTE (Bands 1-5, 7, 8, 17, 20, 25). Our loaner unit came with a T-Mobile SIM installed, which worked without issue in my tests. Call quality was excellent, but nothing beyond the normal realm of more modestly priced smartphones like the GS5. Voices come through clearly in the earpiece, though I would have liked a bit more volume for noisier environments. Transmissions through the mic are full and easy to understand, while noise cancellation worked well in my tests.   

Also onboard are dual-band 802.11b/g/n/ac Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.0, and GPS radios, all of which worked without issue. The Signature Touch is Qi-compatible for wirelessly charging the 2,275mAh battery. We're still performing formal battery tests, but anecdotally, the Signature Touch was able to last me through a day's worth of typical use.

Performance, Android, and Perks

Performance, Android, and Camera
Powering the Signature Touch is a quad-core 2.3GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 SoC—the same one found in the GS5 and One (M8). I'd wager high-net-worth individuals couldn't care less about benchmarks and such sundries. All that matters is that the Signature Touch is fast and capable of handling most anything you throw at it at least as well as any other Android phone on the market. There's a single 64GB model with two partitions: an 11.78GB partition for system and app data, and a 43.56GB partition for media and personal files.

The Signature Touch runs Android 4.4.2 KitKat with some light aesthetic changes courtesy of Vertu. When you first power the phone on, you'll be greeted by a shiny clock widget with a mesmerizing parallax effect—tilt the phone and the sheen on the clock shifts. Wow. Such luxury. Aside from spiffy new icons and widgets, Vertu also added Dolby audio profiles and two power saving modes, which dial back wireless connectivity to varying degrees. The rest of Android is essentially a stock experience, aside from the built-in Vertu perks, which I'll get to shortly.

Around back is a 13-megapixel camera, with a 2.1-megapixel shooter up front. The rear-facing camera takes great images in good lighting, producing crisp details and lifelike colors. Dynamic range was also above average, preserving details in shadows without overexposing highlights. Indoors things start to get a bit grainy, and I noticed the Signature Touch struggling with exposure at times. The biggest drawback here is the relatively long shutter delay. Instead of instantaneous shots like you'll get with an iPhone 5s or Galaxy S5, there's a brief but noticeable pause between pressing the capture button and actually snapping a pic. Video tops out at 1080p and framerates are steady at 30fps. It's a solid camera, no doubt, but despite the Hasselblad branding, it's only on par with its competitors and in some cases lags behind.

The Perks of Being Obscenely Rich
Beyond the specs and design, the real reasons you even consider a Vertu phone are the perks. There are three main services that go well beyond anything you'll find in competing phones: Vertu Life, Concierge, and Certainty. Vertu Life offers a curated collection of exclusive events and experiences that might otherwise be difficult to access. These includes things like a private submarine tour around the Maldives, front-row seats to the Espys, and VIP stays at high-end hotels. There is no way someone in my position would be able to weasel my way into any of these events, but it's possible that someone who can afford a $10,800 phone could. The key here is the effort involved—Vertu does all the legwork.

Concierge is even more impressive. It's essentially an open-ended version of Vertu Life, limited only by your imagination (and legal boundaries, of course). The service comes free with the phone for the first year, after which you'll need to pay around $3,000 per year for the privilege. With it, you get 24/7 access to a real human who will help you with everything from restaurant reservations and last-minute travel bookings to gaining access to exclusive places or events. You can do this over the phone or simply text away with the live chat feature. When asked what kind of things they could do for me, my friendly concierge Quentin casually noted he could get me World Cup final tickets, among other things. Of course, you'll have to pay for the actual items, like tickets and hotel accommodations, but all you have to do is provide a credit card, sit back, and remind yourself that the crippling debt is totally worth it. 

I requested a meet-and-greet with President Obama. The Vertu concierge team is currently working on this—I'll update this review with an Obama selfie should they come through. Unfortunately, my concierge could not procure the winning Powerball numbers for the next drawing. Tsk-tsk; minus one star. 

The far more useful part of concierge, at least for my purposes, was accessing last-minute reservations at hard-to-get-into restaurants. Quentin was able to get me a reservation for four at the Chef's Table at Brooklyn Fare, a restaurant with only 18 seats that must be reserved six weeks in advance, if you can even get through during the short window when they accept reservations. Quentin offered me multiple options for dining there, including a Saturday evening just next week. I can barely get a table at the Chipotle down the street, so this was a huge triumph.

Concierge can also provide an extensive list of recommendations for whatever you might be interested in. I requested some tapas and new American restaurants for an upcoming birthday, and by the next morning I had an email in my inbox with over 10 recommendations in my neighborhood. Quentin also suggested that since it was for a birthday, perhaps car service to and from would be appropriate. Someday, Quentin, someday. For now, I'll walk.

Certainty will appeal to the privacy conscious, integrating end-to-end encryption by Silent Circle for calls, video chats, and instant messaging. You can also find numbers for customer service and support in the Certainty app, and there's even a Remote Assist feature that lets a Vertu technician remotely access your phone and issue fixes. These are all nice, but not exclusive to Vertu and the Signature Touch.

Conclusions
I once thought the massive 6.4-inch Sony Xperia Z Ultra  would be the most ridiculous smartphone I'd ever have the pleasure of reviewing. I was wrong. The Vertu Signature Touch is absolutely bonkers. It simply does not compute, at least for someone like me—a qualification I've had to repeat so many times in this review that I'm starting to question my own self-worth. But Vertu has been in this game since 1998, so there probably are people buying phones this outrageously expensive (I'm looking at you, Russian oligarchs reading PCMag). I thoroughly enjoyed my time with the Signature Touch—I felt like the valet from Ferris Bueller's Day Off, stealing a peek into the lifestyles of the rich and famous. For a brief moment, I felt like I had the world at my fingertips. I can see (from a very far distance) why that alone might be worth the price of entry for Vertu's mega-rich clientele.