So you think iPhones and tablets are way too expensive? Do you baulk at spending $200 for a phone? Are you complaining that smartphones burn out your wallets? Well dig this: A limited edition 18-carat solid gold cellphone with just the basic features is being sold at a whopping price tag of $60,000 (roughly 42,000 euros)!
Danish luxury retailer Aesir recently released the AE+Y which is made out of solid gold; and we all get the fact that the gold alone makes it so pricey. The user interface was designed by renowned designer Tom Hingston.
It boasts of an edge-to-edge keypad which is laser engraved and has “advanced LED backlighting” (although we’re not sure what this means and how it differs with the regular LED backlighting). We got to hand it to Aesir because this kind of keypad is a first for a cellphone. The look is very sleek and the idea of a gold phone is very creative and impressive. It has “bare bone” features — a 2-inch LCD screen, call forwarding, speed dialing, a battery that can handle 5 hours of talk time, and a built-in calculator. However, everything stops there.
Now that we know what AE+Y has in features, let’s talk about what it does not have. We have a long list here — it has no apps, no email, no mobile internet, no games, no camera, no navigation system, just the average age-old cellular phone. Still, we have to give it to Aesir for skipping out on these features. The absurd design and lack of features were actually by intentional design. So, why would Aesir go through all that trouble to produce a $60,000 phone? And does somebody really want to buy it for its stone-age features just so he could say, “Hey, my phone costs this much”? Well, I guess somebody out there really wants to buy it.
As we can see, only the filthy rich could afford this phone. Some of the extremely rich even commented that if they were to buy a phone for that crazy price, it better have incredible features to justify the outrageous price. The retailer is planning to sell it to Moscow’s fashion-forward elite. In a news feature on Yahoo, the company said they were aiming for the phone to be treated as a collector’s item and not for the purpose of being used as an everyday phone.
Company founder Thomas Jensen told Reuters, “It’s a collector’s item. People are used to collecting, say, watches, while designer phones is a practically empty niche.” According to him, it took three years to develop the phone and that it is “not a play thing.” So if you are obscenely rich and enjoy letting everyone around you know it, then you are the perfect client for Aesir AE+Y.
If you want to own an AE+Y but could ill-afford the gold version (because you are only rich as opposed to super rich), you need not worry. Just wait for a little while because Aesir will be releasing a stainless steel version of the phone. The price is a lot “cheaper” than the gold one, but it is still ridiculously high — $10,000. Hurray!
Aesir will be releasing a limited quantity of the phone, reportedly around 5,000. The super expensive phone, both the gold and stainless steel versions, will be released in Europe this fall and in the U.S. after that.
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