Tech24H

Vertu Aster is a luxury smartphone with 'mid-tier' price, top-tier specs

Since the launch of the Signature Touch, Vertu CEO Max Pogliani promised that "technology will be more a merging factor and not a differentiation point" for his phones.

Vertu Aster is a luxury smartphone with 'mid-tier' price, top-tier specs

That's literally the case with the new mid-tier Aster launched today: This titanium Android device is every bit identical to its flagship sibling device internally, just wrapped within a more contemporary and unisex design.

We're looking at a 4.7-inch 1080p display, a 5.1-inch 117 carat sapphire screen, a 2.3GHz quad-core Snapdragon 801 chipset, a 13-megapixel Hasselblad-certified main camera with twin LED flash, a 2.1-megapixel front-facing imager, 64GB of internal storage, a 2,275mAh battery, front stereo speakers, NFC, Qi wireless charging and great LTE compatibility (though no love for China, for some reason). With the specs out of the way, let's look at why this swanky phone starts from $6,900 or £4,200.