Gresso Luxury Phones Get Black Diamonds

If your phone doesn't offer enough sense of luxury...maybe an expensive handset from Russia featuring black diamonds and Roman numerals will tickle your fancy?

When it comes to the world of luxury mobile phones, there’s no doubt that the market thrives on form over function. High-end handsets from Vertu certainly offer a lot in the way of bling, high price tags, and exclusivity, but as phones they barely hold their own with discount offerings from most mobile operators. Nonetheless, there must be a market for these items, because new ones keep popping up on the market.

Such is the case with the new Black Diamond and Royal Black Diamond phones from Gresso. So far as anyone knows, Gresso operates out of Russia, and the company has previously offered a high-end luxury phone with a casing made from African blackwood. Now, the company is back with its "Collection Avantgarde Black Diamonds." The company is offering two models: Black Diamonds, which features 4 rare black diamonds totaling .44 carets, gold function keys, a stainless steel cover, and a casing made from 200 year-old African blackwood. The Royal Black Diamond phone—of which just 50 will be made—sports 2.53 carets worth of black diamonds.

On a technical basis, the phones are two-band GSM devices with 320 by 240 pixel LCD displays. Gresso says they run Windows Mobile 6 Standard, which means they ought to be able to tie into enterprise email systems, surf the Internet, and access Windows Media content. The phones come with 64 MB of RAM, 2 GB of "external memory" (which we assume will be in the form of microSD cards), and offer a 2 megapixel camera. And, in a feature Gresso claims is unique to the Black Diamond phones, the keypads are numbered in Roman numerals.

Gresso plans to launch the line this month, with the Black Diamond model priced at €9,000, with the limited Royal Black Diamond edition going for €30,000. Such a bargain!