London, October 20:

Diamonds are forever, but mobile phones are not designed to last quite so long. Unless you are a lucky recipient of a jewel-encrusted mobile this Christmas, that is. Vertu, a subsidiary of Nokia, is producing 200 mobile phones decorated with diamonds. The most expensive of the range are believed to be the first mobile handsets to cost in the region of £50,000.

The company, which sells the mobiles through expensive jewellers and department stores such as Harrods in London, plans to ship the first of the diamond handsets next week. The phones are handmade at the company’s headquarters near Hook in southern England, and are already pre-sold. But don’t worry if a Vertu phone is on your Chrismas wish list. The company produces a range of ‘cheaper’ handsets also.

So what do you get for your £50,000? Down the side of the phone is something called a pave, jewellers’ parlance for a ‘carpet’ of tiny diamonds. The keypads of the most expensive handsets are made up of eight carats’ worth of diamonds. The keypad itself is housed in a body of white gold or platinum, underpinned with ruby bearings and furnished with the same ceramic material that was initially manufactured for the space shuttle.

Objects of desire: “Luxury isn’t about need, it is about want,” explains Chris Harris, the company’s UK sales director. “We all have our areas where we spend beyond reason because we get a buzz from it. Owners of Vertu know they are buying an object that only a few people can own.’’ Indeed, consumer technology has long had a luxury market that, at its peak, is often indistinguishable from jewellery. The humble timepiece can cost £10, but it can also cost £10,000 and do its job little better. But to the owner, that’s not the point. You only have to look at the Persian wealth currently on show at the British Museum to see that everyday objects have long been status symbols.

Surprisingly, the £50,000 phone comes with just a single year’s warranty, doe-sn’t have a camera and the-re are no promises to retrofit the handsets if the current GSM technology.

Even a £50,000 phone has a finite lifespan as a working model. But then again, it is easy to be snotty about such success. What Vertu is doing, after all, is establishing a luxury brand that is becoming synonymous with hi-tech phones — just as Switzerland is with high-end watches. And you can admire a Vertu almost like a Faberge egg. The engineering is technically excellent and the aforementioned ruby bearings are designed to perform millions of actuations over the handset’s life cycle, for example. The phones are far more durable than regular brands and are expected to last up to 20 years if looked after properly.

David Beckham, Gwy-neth Paltrow and Brad Pitt all own Vertu phones, as do members of the Saudi royal family. And Vertu is not the only firm making pho-nes that go bling, bling.

Motorola is rumoured to be producing a limited edition, solid gold version of its superslim clamshell, th-e V3. Last month, Samsu-ng, one of the biggest ‘non-luxury’ phones manufacturers, announced a partnership with Bang & Olu-fsen, the Danish makers of sleekly audio equipment.