Nokia Test Drives $25,0000 Ferrari Phone

By Geoff Duncan September 27, 2007

Nokia Test Drives $25,0000 Ferrari Phone

The market for high-end luxury phones is apparently lucrative enough that, not only are more big-name players (like Armani and Dolce & Gabbana) getting into the field but the prices for exclusive handsets seem to be reaching new levels. Such might be the case for the new Ferrari Ascent 60 candybar-style phone from Vertu, the luxury unit of Finland’s Nokia, which the company has started selling at its flagship stores in London, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Paris for a mere €18,000—about $25,000 U.S. dollars.

Designed jointly with Ferrari, the Ascent 60 phone celebrates Ferrari’s 60th anniversary. At a technical level, the Ascent 60 doesn’t seem to be anything particularly special, offering tri-band GSM connectivity, Bluetooth, a 20mm handsfree loudspeaker, and USB synchronization with PCs and Macs (although the cable is sold separately: one might think at that price a cable wouldn’t be too much to throw in the box, but…). The phone also comes with custom Ferrari ringtones, including a revving and overrun Enzo Ferrari engine. The phone also supports MMS and SMS messaging, offers multilingual text prediction, and offers standard phone apps like an alarm clock, calendar, calculator, and a 1,000-name address book. It should get up to four hours of talk time and up to 270 hours of standby time on a single battery charge. No music player, no portable TV, no integrated GPS. But it comes with a screensaver featuring Ferrari graphics.

On the surface, though the phone features a Sapphire Crystal display, precision-engineered steel keys on jeweled bearings, a hand-polished titanium case, hand-stitched Ferrari leather on the back, and a battery plate which (we’re not making this up) is a 1:100 replica of a Ferrari manual shift grid.

We can only guess things really are different for the rich.

Editors' Recommendations

Former Digital Trends Contributor

Geoff Duncan writes, programs, edits, plays music, and delights in making software misbehave. He's probably the only member…

Mobile

My camera test of the two best flip phones was frustratingly close

The back of the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 5 and Galaxy Z Flip 4.

Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 5 (left) and Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 4 Andy Boxall / Digital Trends

Fingers were pointed accusingly in Samsung’s direction when the Galaxy Z Flip 5 was launched — largely due to the cameras, on paper, not being upgraded over the Galaxy Z Flip 4. But was this indignation justified?

Mobile

Motorola’s folding phone just had a durability test — and it’s painful to watch

Motorola Razr 40 Ultra broken cover screen.

Motorola’s latest clamshell foldable, the Motorola Razr Plus, has won well-deserved praise for its design and the functionally rewarding cover screen that occupies almost one-half of the rear panel. In my brief time with the phone, I felt that Samsung’s upcoming Galaxy Z Flip 5 will have a hard time beating this one.
Praise aside, it looks like the Razr Plus' top selling point could also be its undoing. Zack Nelson of JerryRigEverything put the phone through his customarily brutal stress and bend test, and the Razr Plus failed at an unexpected point.
This has NEVER happened before...
While applying pressure on the rear side of the phone to check the hinge strength, the lower edge of the cover display breaks rather awkwardly. First, the screen shatters, and then, the glass assembly can be seen caving inside.
“Never have we ever been able to break a screen with a single finger,” says Nelson. However, it appears that the cover screen’s fragility has more to do with the gap underneath than the structural integrity of the glass itself.
It seems the area right above the hinge is hollow, which means putting pressure on the cover display could damage the screen, as there is no solid support underneath. Simply put, don’t put the phone in the back pocket of your denim jeans, and take care about putting heavy objects over the phone.
What’s really surprising is that unlike the Google Pixel Fold’s fragile frame and hinge mechanism, the Motorola Razr Plus didn’t show any such signs of damage. There was no permanent damage recorded due to the phone bending in the reverse direction, and the flexible OLED screen also remained intact.

It’s quite paradoxical that the cover display — which Motorola markets as the Razr Plus's standout feature — is also the part that is uncannily fragile. But the rest of the package seems solid.
Motorola told Digital Trends in an emailed interview that the Razr Plus ships “with an optimized inner structure stacking and stronger housing design” and that it also features “the industry’s first dual-axis tracking in the teardrop hinge.”
Compared to the previous-generation Razr foldable phones, this one can survive 400,000 folding cycles, twice that of its predecessors. It’s a great phone, and if you want to see how it stands out, Digital Trends Prakhar Khanna had some fun with its cover screen to see everything that it can accomplish. And it's great! So long as you don't accidentally shatter it like this.

Mobile

Bend or break? Watch the Nothing Phone 2 face its first durability test

The Nothing Phone 2 undergoes a durability test.

One of the biggest smartphone launches of the year took place on Tuesday, and popular YouTuber Zack Nelson -- he of JerryRigEverything -- wasted no time in subjecting the new Nothing Phone 2 to one of his trademark durability tests.

Now, Nelson usually accompanies his torture-test videos with a dryly delivered though often amusing commentary, but on this occasion, he decided that, being the Nothing phone an’ all that, he’d say absolutely nothing and let the visuals do the talking instead.