Mobile Luxury?

Nokia has the Vertu line of "luxury" phones. These are "luxury" in the sense that expensive watches have become "luxury" items; they're manufactured with more expensive materials and are ornamented to look fancy. Functionality doesn't improve, of course, and in fact may be worse.

Now Tag Heuer is coming at the same idea from the other direction -- they make watches, and have announced plans to introduce "luxury" phones.

I don't really share this view of what high end or luxury mean. On the Vertu site the introductory flash promo shows all sorts of things that have only one thing in common: expense. One message from this is that "expensive" can also mean bandwidth. The other is that I think "expensive", when associated with "luxury", generally means "waste" nowadays. Waste of materials, waste of design effort on fashion over function, waste of money and resources at every step along the way.

To me, the best expression of luxury has to do with clean, simple, effective function. Not having to screw around with poorly-made, poorly-functioning, poorly-designed things and processes -- that's luxury.