A foldable phone like no other

Starts at SEK 64,000

The luxury brand Vertu has just launched Alphafold, a foldable phone with an internal 8-inch screen and a price tag of SEK 64,000 and up.

With a price of SEK 64,000 and up, more if you choose alligator skin and 24 carat gold, Very targets a small target group with its foldable phone. The phone will be sold to Swedish customers and is aimed at affluent consumers worldwide. Vertu started as a more luxurious part of Nokia and since then the brand has changed hands and is formally registered in Hong Kong while the main part of the business such as manufacturing, engineering, service and marketing teams is based in China.

24/7 service line

With the purchase of a Vertu phone, there is also a 24-hour hotline where the customer can get help. This can be about restaurant bookings, hotels, transport and other help. As a customer, you can contact this service directly from the phone. The built-in AI agent in the phone called Hermes can be used to contact the Vertus service team. They must be able to provide help and service regardless of where you are in the world.

The phone itself

We don’t yet have all the complete facts about the phone itself, but it’s a foldable phone with an 8-inch inner foldable screen and a 6.5-inch outer screen. The phone should be 11.8 millimeters thick when folded and 5.4 millimeters when unfolded, about a millimeter thicker than the Samsung Galaxy X Fold 7 in other words.

The Vertu Alphafold has a folding mechanism that should be tested for 650,000 folds and the phone is powered by Snapdragon 8 Gen 4. The cameras consist of the main camera and wide-angle, the latter with an unusually small sensor and, in addition, a simple telephoto lens with a 5-megapixel sensor and unspecified zoom.

Own AI agent must be able to do the job

Like Samsung, Vertu focuses a lot on AI, but this is about a different focus. Vertu Alphafold intends to use its AI Hermes Agent to function as a helper and not just a chatbot. According to Vertu, it should be able to plan trips, review your agenda, communicate and manage work-related tasks for the business leaders who are the target group. It must also be able to be connected and integrated with business systems of various kinds. As an example, you should be able to ask it to “arrange the trip to Geneva tomorrow, sync meetings, transport, hotel and meetings with my work group”. It must therefore be able to carry out tasks and not just present instructions on what to do. For business connections, the agent can also answer questions such as “how is our store performing compared to budget”.

In the screen, one part must be able to display documents, communication and statistics, while the other part shows the agent’s analyses. Vertu calls this a breakthrough in foldable phones and that it will become something of a business executive’s control panel.

It is a phone with priorities like no other manufacturer, partly weak performance compared to competitors and very different material selection and ancillary services. We will get back to how it performs in practice when we test it.