The Canadian luxury buffs over at Mobiado have been churning out obscenely expensive (not to mention obscenely designed) phones since 2004, and if you were to look at their line-up, one thing would become immediately clear: none of them are worth the price. Dumbphones swathed in gold and pearl inlays are still dumbphones, after all.
That said, Mobiado is trying something new with their Grand Touch series: bedazzled smartphones! The Grand Touch and the Grand Touch GCB are Gingerbread-powered handsets with 4-inch Super-AMOLED displays. Not too shabby, compared to everything else in their inventory. Both devices have sapphire crystal buttons and sapphire crystal backplates, but while the Grand Touch’s body is made of “precision CNC machined from solid aircraft aluminum,” the Grand Touch GCB is plated in 24k gold.
What Mobiado declines to tell their discerning customers, though, is that you can buy the exact same device for (I would imagine) considerably less, without all the gilded trappings. That’s because what Mobiado seems to have done is buy a up a boatload of Samsung Nexus Ss and gave them a makeover. The slightly-curved screen is a bit of a giveaway, but things like port placement and the amount of fixed internal storage (16GB) seal the deal.
Still, they’ve got quite the racket going. These sorts of devices were always meant for people who have more money than taste, and who’s to say the uber-rich won’t fall in love? Mobiado has declined to list a price for the Grand Touch series, but there’s a useful rule of thumb when it comes to this sort of thing: if you have to ask how much it is, you probably can’t afford it.