Vertu auctioning off ‘leftover’ phones, starting at $26,000

The luxury smartphone brand that went belly up is auctioning off its back catalog of phones with bids starting at a whopping $26,000.

You’ve probably heard a thing or two about Vertu, a British luxury smartphone manufacturer that officially declared bankruptcy about a month ago. Vertu’s phones had fantastically uninspiring designs and equally uninspiring specs but cost anywhere from $4,200 to a whopping $30,000. So yes, it was really only a matter of time until the company called it quits. The owner of the company offered to pay $2.4 million to pay creditors, but that obviously wasn’t enough when the company was in $166 million debt.

Well, Vertu may have shut down, but apparently, it still has a few devices from its back catalog to get rid of. The phones in question are 105 models are from the Vertu museum, dating anywhere from 2002 to 2015, and according to the auctioneer G J Wisdom & Co, they are a mix of concept models to fully functional devices. In other words, some phones aren’t even operational! The starting price for these 105 phones, some of which might not even work? £20,000 or $26,000!

If you have nowhere else to spend your money, you can head on over to Bid Spotter to start bidding on a bunch of antiquated phones encased with gaudy and over-the-top materials like gold and diamonds. If I were you, however, I’d spend it elsewhere.

Fun fact: you’d be surprised to learn that Vertu actually sold 450,000 devices worldwide by 2015. Of course, it’s trivial when compared to the number of devices that major smartphone manufacturers like Samsung and Apple sell, but it’s both astonishing and disturbing to know that there are thousands of people out there who were willing to cough up tens of thousands of dollars for a phone.

Will you be bidding on Vertu’s back catalog of phones? Do you think luxury phones can survive in the smartphone world? Let us know by leaving a comment below!