Who needs Siri when you’ve a $10,000 phone and a real assistant?

I would totally buy one of these. If I had $10,000 and no sense, if I had a need for an assistant more accurate than Siri, and if this new Vertu Signature Touch phone ran iOS. As it is, I haven’t, I haven’t, I haven’t and it doesn’t.

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(Image from Vertu and via Wired.com)

Actually, I’m not even sure I like the look of it. For that cost – and please note that $10,000 is the starting price for the base model, you can spend up to $21,900 – I’d want to like looking at this plastic and metal embodiment of a bank loan.

Wait, I’m feeling the cost of this but only intellectually. Let me punch myself in the stomach with the Sterling prices. The base model is £5,972.41. The top one is £13,079.58.

Actually, that sounds reasonable. I’ll take two. Have you got them in blue?

Oh, wait, there is a tiny extra. Just £1,791.72 or $3,000 per year extra:

The Signature Touch’s Concierge service is what sets it apart from other phones. It’s free for the first year, then jumps to around $3,000 a year. Concierge makes the phone more like an American Express Black Card or a diplomatic passport. It works like this: You request (legal and somewhat reasonable) things via the Concierge app, and then a real, live person makes them happen. You basically have a personal assistant on call at all times. A little button on the side of the phone fires up the Concierge app directly. The assistant who helped me was Celine. She was great.

To commence my Vertu experience, the company offered to book me a dinner reservation at the members-only CORE:Club to show how the Concierge could gain access to exclusive places. I declined that offer, as I wanted to test the Concierge using my own requests.

Instead, I checked OpenTable at 2:00 p.m. on a Saturday and found popular restaurants fully booked that day and on the weekend. There was nothing available for dinner at ABC Kitchen in a few hours or brunch at Red Rooster the next morning. I opened the Concierge app and asked for reservations at 7:30pm that night and noon the next day, knowing it would be tricky. No problem, reservations booked. Thanks Celine! On another Saturday night, I was a head-nod away from getting a group of five on the VIP list at a fancy club called Avenue. If we’d been willing to pay $200 apiece for a table and bottle service—and had any intention of actually going—we’d have been in. Coincidentally, $200 is the price of a normal phone.

What It’s Like to Use a $10k Phone with a Real-Life Personal Assistant – Tim Moynihan, Wired (5 June 2014)

Read the full article: Moynihan is very conscious of the cost yet also able to step away from that and see the benefits and the problems of the phone and service.