Vertu opens Philippine flagship store

Britain’s Vertu has recently opened its first flagship store in the Philippines and introduced its latest collection of handmade luxury mobile phones.The store is located at the ground floor of the new East Wing of Shangri-La Mall in Ortigas and is managed by Lucerne Jewelers.Its latest phone is the Vertu Constellation (pictured), which touts prohibitively expensive materials like a 5.1-inch piece of Sapphire crystal weighing more than 100 carats  to cover the entire front of the phone featuring a 4.3-inch 720p high definition screen.Its casing puts plastic and aluminum to shame, using engineered grade 5 titanium which is two and a half times stronger than stainless steel yet only half the weight. To top it off, Vertu Constellation has backed with rare hides available from the Alps region of Europe.The internals of the phone are high-end but it won’t trump any of this year’s flagships from the likes of Samsung, LG or Apple, however. It features Android 4.2 Jelly Bean, Qualcomm Snapdragon dual core 1.7 GHz CPU, 32GB of internal memory, 13MP rear-facing camera with full HD video (1080p), a front-facing Skype-compliant 1.3MP camera, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and NFC.The luxury phone comes at a luxury price at a whooping 4,900 Euros (around P290,000) - a price tag definitely targeted at the higher end of the Philippine mobile market and undeniably unreachable for the rest of the population.