Plenty of luxury smartphones offer the best technology, materials and security, along with one or two other perks, but the top end of the market lacks gadgets that can tick all of the boxes while looking great.
Sirin Labs's Solarin is the world's most secure smartphone, but the £9,500 behemoth is far from the sexiest – it's a thick, hefty piece, secure enough to drop onto concrete time and time again without breaking.
Similarly, Vertu's Signature line handsets, which start from £9,500, resemble old block-style phones complete with physical buttons.
The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
SUBSCRIBE & SAVE
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
Join more than 350,000 subscribers and keep yourself informed with a selection of The Week’s most interesting, enlightening and entertaining stories - plus daily puzzles.
Join more than 350,000 subscribers and keep yourself informed with a selection of The Week’s most interesting, enlightening and entertaining stories - plus daily puzzles.
Latest Videos FromThe Week
An awful lot of companies boast designs verging from strange to just plain gaudy. But one Swiss firm appears to have nailed it, offering a luxury device with a design that's simple and elegant while making use of premium-build materials.
Goldvish's latest phone, the Eclipse, starts from £5,600, so it's considerably cheaper than some of the firm's older pieces.
In 2007, Goldvish created the most expensive mobile phone in history. Le Million was a solid gold and diamond-encrusted handset with a sticker price of €1m. Two years later, the price of another of their phones was well into six figures.
Both were considerably different to the phablet-sized Eclipse, which boasts a completely clean, slate-like 5.5ins 1080p display that feeds around to a blackplate mixing leather and precious metals. There's very little fuss and frills; just neat design tweaks to a very conventional smartphone shape.
The alligator-print leather finish comes in a number of colours, including grey, mocha, black and a creamy white. Straddling it are cross members made from polished 316L stainless steel, commonly known as marine grade steel, leading to an anodised aluminium unibody casing.
If polished stainless steel isn't to your taste, you can swap them for a variety of materials, including 18 carat gold, says Luxurious Magazine. You can even have one adorned with diamonds while personal mottos and names can be engraved on the casing, too.
A personal assistant will help you through the possibilities before your bespoke case is handmade in Switzerland.
Service like this points to a luxury smartphone that is very design-led rather than hardware-focussed. The Eclipse does comes with an encryption software for completely secure calls to other Goldvish phones, but the £5,600 price tag doesn’t buy much more tech than you can find on many of the flagship smartphones on the high street.
A Snapdragon 800 chipset is mated to 3GB RAM, which, while powerful enough for a smartphone, lags behind the likes of the Samsung Galaxy S7. It also runs Android Lollipop 5.1 out of the box, not the latest version of Google's mobile operating system.
However, the 4K video-recording capability of the 13-megapixel camera is much more up to scratch, as is the dual speaker and 3,100mAh battery.
Overall, the Eclipse boasts premium, luxury credentials, but it's a phone likely to be bought for its elegant, handmade design, customisation and exclusivity, rather than its technical specifications.
