Are you obscenely rich and really enjoy letting everyone around you know it? Then you may be the ideal customer for the new 18-carat solid gold cell phone known as the Aesir AE+Y. The Aesir AE+Y comes with an 18-carat solid gold case plus a keypad with “advanced LED backlighting” and is priced at no less than $60,000. Ironically enough, for such an expensive contraption, the solid gold cell phone lacks features such as email, GPS navigation, games, a built-in camera and applications, though it does come with speed dial, a calculator, and call forwarding.
Those lack of features and bizarre design are not by accident, however – Aesir are quite shameless in admitting that the solid gold cell phone is a fashion statement to the fashion-forward, ultra-rich elite to let the rest of the world know just how well off they really are, in case anyone had any doubts. “It’s a collector’s item,” says Thomas Jensen, the founder of Aesir. “People are used to collecting, say, watches, while designer phones is a practically empty niche.”
For the rich as opposed to the absolutely filthy rich, Aesir is also offering a stainless steel variant of the phone, which comes with a considerably cheaper, albeit still obscenely expensive for the great majority of people, price tag of “just” $10,000. Both versions will make their debut in Europe in the fall, with the United States expected to follow soon after.