I Investigated the Most Expensive Phone Brand

What is discussed, and when

1. 0:00 – 3:00: Agent Q, Meta Virtue 2, Vertu Quantum
2. 6:00 – 9:00: Waldorf Hilton Hotel
3. 9:00 – 12:00: Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 7 Ultra

Notable quotes from "I Investigated the Most Expensive Phone Brand"

• Then we got their $6,300 Meta Virtue 2 smartphone.

  about Meta Virtue 2 · at 1:17

• But instead, they upgraded me to the much higherend Waldorf Hilton Hotel without me paying an extra penny. I checked the room rate online, and this Waldorf Hotel would have cost me £527 a night. And I've got the booking receipt.

  about Waldorf Hilton Hotel · at 8:37

• High-performance flip phones. I mean just for starters, it says the best overall phone is the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 7 Ultra, a smartphone that is not theirs and also doesn't…

  about Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 7 Ultra · at 10:18

Who and what is mentioned in this episode?

Companies & orgs

• Veru — Company · 10 mentions
• Nokia — Company · 1 mention
• Opera — Company · 1 mention

Products & tech

• Meta Virtue 2 — Product · 1 mention · first at 1:20
• Vertu Quantum — Product · 1 mention · first at 1:29
  Their $7,940 flip phone, the Vertu Quantum, all finished off with their main new flagship phone, the Agent Q that I showed you a minute ago. And all of these products have extremely beautiful.
• Agent Q — Product · 1 mention · first at 1:35
  Flip phone, the Vertu Quantum, all finished off with their main new flagship phone, the Agent Q that I showed you a minute ago. And all of these products have extremely…
• Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 7 Ultra — Product · 1 mention · first at 10:21

Places & events

• Waldorf Hilton Hotel — Place · 1 mention · first at 8:39

Full transcript with timestamps

0:01 Okay, this is a $5,400 smartphone from a company called Veru. And it is so luxury that I can just press this ruby button and be immediately connected to a personal concierge who will try to solve my every need. Are you a real person? Vert is a fascinating brand because unlike every other luxury phone company who just takes an iPhone and covers it in gold, this is its own piece of tech designed for the ballers of the world and it seems super legit. It's a British brand that was started by Nokia. Their official social media accounts hit hundreds of millions of real views. They sell inherents, which is a really well-established Uber luxury department store in the UK. I even took a trip myself just to make sure. And there they were. Oh, they just got back to me. The concierge service is provided entirely by real professionals. Okay. Can you book me a hotel in London?

0:51 Send. This seems amazing, but there's something not right here. There is something very odd going on with this Veru company. And so we've gotten our hands on all the key Virtue products to get to the bottom of it. So that starts with probably the plushest packaging I've ever seen come with a tech product. Inside of which is their $4,300 smartwatch. Then we got their $6,300 Meta Virtue 2 smartphone. their $7,940 flip phone, the Vertu Quantum, all finished off with their main new flagship phone, the Agent Q that I showed you a minute ago. And all of these products have extremely beautiful presentation. They're just slightly strange. Like in this bottom box, we have a drawer which contains this tiny cable and a pouch for it, but they're just sitting there loose inside. Their other phones had chargers. This one didn't. And then above that is an envelope with a big chunky manual.

1:57 But it's very interesting that the first language is Arabic for a phone brand that has England literally as part of their name. Maybe they sell more in Arab countries. Then the phone itself comes in its own completely separate very fancy compartment. Okay. They got back to me. They said, "It's my pleasure to assist you. May I know your preferred check-in date? I want to make this specifically complex. Check-in. December 25th, Christmas, one of the busiest days of the year. Room that has a view of the London Eye. So, this is going to absolutely require human involvement. And then a receptionist that can speak Hindi. Wo, they just responded. Got it. Well, while that's happening, I got to say, when I first saw these online, I thought they look like they would feel cheap, but I can confirm they don't. Every single one of these products is about 50% heavier than they look thanks to hundreds of

2:55 stainless steel components. They're all clearly designed to flex the craftsmanship that's gone into them with this hand assembled aesthetic that has as many screws and mechanical pieces as possible. It has helped them to achieve their very clear objective, which is to make the iPhone look relatively plain by comparison. And it is making me feel like a freaking Bond villain with things like this hidden mechanism on the back. You push into the middle screws from the sides to pop out not one but two physical SIM card trays that are completely toolless which is actually such a big improvement from fiddling around with the SIM ejector. Okay, I forgot to give him the checkout date. So we'll say 2 days later 27th. And then he said because we need to verify both the room view and the availability of Hindi speaking reception staff it will take approximately 20 minutes.

3:39 That's really fast. And I can see the appeal of the software too. Like the screen lock animation is absolutely sick. There's a whole bunch of different themes. There's Prada and Louis Vuitton and Hermes. It's hard to tell if they're genuine or not, but if Veru has legitimately gotten all of these extremely high-end brands on board, fair play to them. And I've never seen a volume up and down animation like this. Although horrible worry vibration motor sound. And that's kind of the issue, too. Every time I notice that something is great, I notice something else is terrible, like the speakers. So, this is the iPhone, and this is Ver 2's latest and greatest.

4:25 Pretty shocking. Or the sheer inconsistency of having the sharpest, most angular phone body that I've ever used, but then paired with the most rounded looking display that makes the end result feel like an afterthought. Or the watch. This thing is so weighty and materially does feel like it would nicely match your goldplated supercar. But when I use it, the main thing that I see is just the fact that the display is not very high resolution. So all of these supposedly luxury watch faces just look a bit soft and not convincingly like real watch faces. Plus, the crown is not very consistent at picking up when you're scrolling. And there's lots of apps where text doesn't feel properly formatted. Also, I'm not being funny, but where is the time? Or just the fact that this flip phone, intricately hand assembled as it may be, with extra fancy cover screen customization befitting of its price, has a hinge that makes a

5:13 concerning amount of noise when you open and close it. Let's see what Arthur has cooked up. Wait, what? They actually found a hotel room that has the London Eye perfectly framed in the middle of the window to fill the entire view. It's so perfect, it almost makes me think they've AI generated it. But they are saying to me, I can book this room right now. It's an executive studio. Two nights, £580. I'm actually curious, though. That £580, is that the same, less, or more than what I would pay if I booked it myself? Oh, that's the room, so it's real. But this is £49 per night, which means this would cost me £818 to book on the site. Maybe they're using another site like Booking.com. And then, because this is the Opera browser, our sponsor, I can just drag one tab into another to instantly split screen them.

5:57 Executive Studio City View. Wait, so they charge exactly £818 too. Book, please. Booking name, Richard Ashley. Send. And now they want me to pay them on their PayPal account. That feels like such a Facebook marketplace thing to ask. Send money. £580. Add note. Thank you, Arthur. Okay. And now I guess I just take a photo and we send it to him. What a strange way of doing things in 2025. But I got to say, I've never seen anything like this concage feature before. And if it has actually just saved me hundreds of pounds, and that's kind of insane.

6:33 Although, this is actually so unsettling. So, you've got six different people that you can chat to. There's Arthur Fiona Samuel Elellanena Claraara, and then Amber. These aren't real. Those are AI generated images. Can we expand to see more? Oh. Oh my god. Yeah, that cannot be a real person. I mean, whose room looks like this? Chat with someone else, Fiona. Uh, this is the same chat. So, how is it possible that they're real people if whoever you select has the same set of messages? It's got to be AI. But then they're straight up telling me that they are real people. They seem to be texting like real people and they're doing real people things like taking my money. I have an idea.

7:18 How may I help you? I just wanted to check. Has a booking been made for me? The name is Richard Ashley. 25th of December till the 27th of December. Correct.

7:28 That is correct. Yes. How was that booking made? Was it made over the phone? Over the website?

7:33 Website. Okay. Do you have a contact detail for who actually made the booking? No, I do not.

7:40 So, the booking is legit. And I don't think an AI alone could have done all that. So, there must be a person involved. But then it's not for this person. So, who is it?

7:50 Okay, I think I've got it. But it's really strange. So I was in the process of booking another hotel using one of the other Vertu phones. The concier had recommended one and we got to the stage where all the details were essentially put together into one summarized message for me to confirm. Okay, fine. But then bizarrely, they actually got back to me with a photo of the room that I was about to book and they told me not to book it because it would be a bunk bed situation that wouldn't be comfortable. That feels smarter than any AI I've interacted with. But this is the crazy bit. They then recommended a different hotel, which they said they could get to me for £170. So, I paid the money, but then I got this message. While we were in the process of verifying your payment, the final room at the previous property was regrettably taken. And I thought, "Oh, okay. This is it. This is where I find out I've been scammed and

8:35 my money has actually been taken anyway. But instead, they upgraded me to the much higherend Waldorf Hilton Hotel without me paying an extra penny." I checked the room rate online, and this Waldorf Hotel would have cost me £527 a night. And I've got the booking receipt from the hotel. Here I can see that Vertu paid them in Chinese yuan, by the way, which is a little odd for a company with England in their name. But the point is what they paid is the full price on my behalf, but without charging me any extra. So it looks like when you first message about anything, you're talking to AI. So up until this message where all the details of my ask were in one place, all AI. But then this is the point where that seemingly got handed over to a real person in China who checked what I was about to book realized the bunk bed red flag and then stayed with me until it was completely sorted. So everything about the way this

9:22 concage works feels so shady but it does seem to pull through. I even asked it to organize me a trip to Korea and in 24 hours they came back with a full 17page Veru branded PDF of all the stuff to do that even has a detailed budget breakdown and factors in my peanut allergy. It's just how much can you trust a company who makes a website that looks like this? It might look pretty on the surface, but there are some very fundamental problems with it. And look at this. I've collected them all into one neat tab island that I can just collapse like this. So, for starters, I can't see a single product photo that actually looks real. You can just tell from the lighting and the shadows that these have been edited in, which to me implies that there aren't actually a lot of people physically involved with these products. Little bit dodgy, but okay.

10:08 I've got one of their guides over here and I can't believe what I am reading. This is a post on the official Virtue website which talks about the top seven high-performance flip phones. I mean just for starters, it says the best overall phone is the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 7 Ultra, a smartphone that is not theirs and also doesn't exist. It could not be clearer that this is just AI generated slop. They've probably made hundreds of pages like this designed with the sole purpose to just create more opportunities for people browsing the internet to stumble across Veru. But the fact that this company is inherits on the same floor as very established luxury brands and funnily enough also the over $100,000 Louvet headphones that we just featured in luxury tech. Plus the fact that Veru themselves are selling phones all the way up to $100,000 and beyond. Yeah, I only got the base models. The fact that this

11:02 company is stooping to that level is mind-blowing to me. And it really doesn't end to be honest. There's a section here which shows the camera slider in action, but it's just so clearly faked. Like between 0.4x and 1x, there should be a massive difference in magnification, but there just isn't. Or like between 1x and 5x, that is very clearly not five time zoom. They've just taken one very high resolution photo that they are punching in and out of, but not even by the right amount. Intrusive thoughts are getting the better of me. Let's say we reverse image search that photo. Did they even take it? Oh, it's on Unsplash taken by a photographer on a Canon EOS R six. This is not just sloppy. This is fishy, right? And also just half the stuff they write in their promo materials. It doesn't make any sense. Quantum coating weaves stardust folds in hand holds universe. It's really making me feel

11:54 like this is not as big of a team as the company wants you to believe. The customer service number plus 86. That's China. And then the head office is in Hong Kong. The only other thing I'm wondering is there's a personal concierge phone number on the phone. That's the same as the customer service number. Also, China.

12:14 Starting to make sense why they paid the hotel in Yuan. This is it. I think we've got to the crux of it. So, Virtue now is a very different company to the Virtue that first started. So they were actually founded as a subsidiary of Nokia. They were making ultra high-end phones handcrafted in Britain, but then Nokia sold them. Veru got sold to a Swedish private equity group, then sold to Hong Kong-based Golden Holdings in 2015, then sold to a Turkish businessman in 2017, only for the company to then run into some pretty serious financial problems. I've got a report right here from the Telegraph that says Veru had an accounting deficit of 128 million in 2017. that led to all of their 200 UK staff being laid off and then the closure and then later demolishing of that UK factory. No way.

13:01 We're here. I'm literally standing at the exact spot where that factory used to be and it's an Aldi. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that they aren't selling Vertu phones in there. So, everyone thought this company was dead forever only for it to then magically reappear a year later in 2018. same brand but quietly in the background seemingly a new company with a different director, a different set of accounts and now Hong Kong/China based operations as opposed to this lovely establishment in church crookum in the middle of England and also clearly a brand new strategy for social media.

13:38 You know, the only way I even realized Vertie was back is because this Tik Tok popped up completely unprompted on my feed. There's three people who have two phones. It's one person who has an iPhone and then they just throw the iPhone away. Great burn, bro. This video has over 170 million views. There's another one over here, 36 million views. It's just an unboxing of their phone. But then, doesn't it seem a little bit weird that this is an uber luxury brand that isn't verified, by the way, and has very clear grammar errors in the bio?

14:08 Like, they don't seem to understand when to use a comma and when to use capital letters. And the fact that they're using emojis to direct you to where to go for special offers, it comes across like the kind of company that writes their invoices in comic sands. They've got a camera test here. When you realize your $1,000 iPhone looks like a toy next to Ver 2. That's an easy one to test. Okay, same photo on both. Oh, well, they were right about the toy thing. It's just not the iPhone. My teeth blend together on the Ver 2. Now, the phones do do some pretty interesting AI camera things, like you can pull up any image and use text to change things in that image. And you can even convert an image into a video with seemingly no guardrails, even when you're using it for human subjects, too. But the other thing I noticed while messing around with the camera is that this app looks very familiar. This is

14:53 the Ver 2 camera app, and this is the Chinese phone maker ZTE's camera app. And this makes a lot of sense. Phone company that now has its operations in China, feels like a small team, not nearly enough to develop an entire Android skin from scratch. So instead licenses the Android skin from another company that is still niche enough that it wouldn't be obvious who they're copying from and niche enough that they'd be willing to do so. It turns out when you start looking for it, you can see traces of ZTE all over these devices. Vert have tried to hide them.

15:23 Like if you download a device info app, it will tell you that the manufacturer is Veru. But when you dig deep, if you go into the legal documents or you find the actual names of the processes running in the background, the evidence is there. The good news is that there is no ZTE device that exactly matches all the hardware specs of any of these phones. So, what they haven't done is just taken a ZTE phone and stuck some leather on it. The bad news is that what they've done is also not that far off that because this Vert Quantum, for example, when you look closely, starts to resemble the ZTE Nubia Flip 2 a remarkable amount. It's got the same camera layout. It's got the same cover screen size. And yeah, this Ver 2 has a much more powerful Snapdragon chip than the MediaTek one in the Nubia. Then I was just curious. So I delved into the device info on this and 4,325 mAh battery on this Vert. That is such a

16:09 specific unique number and it is also exactly what ZTE has on their Flip 2. So this isn't exactly a let's take a ZTE and stick a Vert logo on top, but it is a let's look at all of the available ZTE parts and pick and choose the ones we want for the Vert, which ultimately makes all of these a very weird set of products. You're paying five times the price of a top-end flagship for a phone experience that's worth about half of one. A website experience worth, let's just say, negative points, but then a concage service that is actually pretty interesting. It's just you're effectively paying so much excess just for what will probably end up as 2 days worth of someone's admin time that you might as well just book that hotel yourself. And to do that, I've actually got a separate workspace on my Opera browser. So, if you look at the top right now, this is all my work tabs. But then the second I decide I'm done, I

16:58 click travel and it all disappears.

Questions about this episode

What is discussed in "I Investigated the Most Expensive Phone Brand"?

In order: 0:00 Agent Q, Meta Virtue 2, Vertu Quantum; 6:00 Waldorf Hilton Hotel; 9:00 Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 7 Ultra.

What is mentioned in this Mrwhosetheboss episode?

8 people, works and ideas are mentioned, including Veru, Meta Virtue 2, Vertu Quantum, Agent Q, Waldorf Hilton Hotel, Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 7 Ultra. Each one on this page links to its own page with every episode that mentions it.

How long is "I Investigated the Most Expensive Phone Brand"?

The episode runs 17 min; the transcript is about 3,306 words in 27 timestamped sections.

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