I reviewed the Vertu Alphafold so you don't have to waste $6,880

There is fresh movement around I reviewed the Vertu Alphafold so you don’t have to waste $6,880, and the story is worth a closer look.

We pulled together what is known so far and what it could mean for the people following it.

There needs to be something very special about a luxury product. Whether it’s something you’ve promised yourself for years, saved up to buy, or will be passed down to future generations, you should feel an attachment to it.

The Vertu Alphafold is priced like a luxury product, and it has some of the features we associate with luxury products. But it’s a phone, and they have long struggled to go beyond being merely “premium.”

Here I am, more than a week into using the Alphafold. Has it, along with its headline AI features, convinced me it’s worth the money?

The Vertu Alphafold is a big-screen folding phone with an AI system designed for use by high-flying business people. What it’s not designed to do is impress spec-fiends, and the AI’s design will need some patience to master. Is it worth it? You’ll need deep pockets to find out.

The Vertu Alphafold costs $6,880 for the calfskin-covered version we have reviewed, and you see in our photos. If you want one with alligator skin on the back, it costs $8,880, and bespoke versions with 18K gold start at $13,800. It’s possible to pay $34,200 for a top Vertu Alphafold.

Vertu is one of the very few luxury smartphone brands, and true competition is hard to find. Instead, if you only look at the specification, we highly recommend looking at the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 7, Google Pixel 10 Pro Fold, Oppo Find N6, and the Honor Magic V6.

Included with the phone is 24 months of access to Vertu’s concierge, a mix of AI and human assistance for just about any request you can imagine. Hermes Agent AI is apparently free to use for Alphafold buyers.

Features like the legal AI and certain dashboards will require an additional cost, which wasn’t available at the time or writing.

There are various confusing levels with extra benefits available at an additional cost to consider, and all seem to require the purchase of a new Vertu device to access.

The Aurum tier costs $3,000 and includes one-on-one concierge service, access to 12 airport lounges, an AI medical consultation, and access to industry reports and publications.

Vertu Life is $8,500 and adds a few more airport lounges to the list, plus reservations at Vertu partner clubs. The $13,800 Vertu Life Obsidian tier adds, bizarrely, a complimentary genetic test, early access to Vertu products, and more events, clubs, and lounges.

The Alphafold is a big-screen folding phone like the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 7 or Oppo Find N6. Except here, the rear panel is covered in soft, stitched, and padded calfskin leather. The outer hinge has a clou-de-Paris pattern, and there are some decorative screw heads in the camera module. It has a unique look, isn’t going to be mistaken for any other device, and provides a lovely tactile experience.

However, this is where the luxury hardware aspects end. Yes, you can buy an Alphafold with alligator leather or with real 18K gold, but don’t expect anything like a titanium chassis, sapphire crystal, embedded rubies, unique mechanical elements, or the signature of the person who hand-finished the device.

These things are mentioned because they were all used to make original Vertu phones more special and more luxurious. Instead, what you get here is a folding phone that feels behind the curve compared to the most recent models.

It’s a lot to do with the 264-gram weight. Some will equate heft with luxury, but here, it takes the form factor back a few generations, to when big-screen foldables were cumbersome and annoying to carry around and use all the time.

After my review period with the Oppo Find N6, I ended up not wanting to stop using it. It is light, well-balanced, slim, and not dramatically different from using a big phone like the Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra. I often forced myself to pick up and use the Alphafold, especially when relaxing, as fatigue sets in after a while.

It’s also hard to view a prominent crease running down the open screen as luxurious, and the camera module design, while being vaguely Vertu-like in its shape, isn’t especially attractive. The hinge is made with titanium and carbon fiber, and has been rated to 650,000 folds according to the data the company, but unfortunately, there’s no IP rating.

There’s nothing wrong with the Alphafold hardware, and it feels nicely made, but it also feels like a folding phone from several years ago, without the many high-end materials and unique touches one may want to find on a product that costs this much.

The Alphafold’s camera is made up of a 50-megapixel main camera, a 50MP wide-angle camera, and a 5MP telephoto camera. The app is smooth and fast, but really oddly designed in one specific way.

In most other modern camera apps I’ve used, there’s a shortcut to a 2x, 5x, 10x zoom, or whatever is appropriate for the device, usually regardless of whether there’s a telephoto camera to support it.

The Alphafold’s camera app has a 1x and a 0.8x shortcut, and that’s all. Odd, considering there’s a 5MP telephoto camera. When you swipe to zoom beyond 1x, there’s an awkwardly placed 2x, 2.4x, and 5x shortcut hidden away.

It’s almost irrelevant that the camera app is poorly designed, because the Alphafold doesn’t take very good photos. In bright, sunny conditions, contrast and exposure levels are often way off in the main and wide-angle camera, although not all the time, and it struggles with focus in low-light situations, when the shutter is very slow. Use any of the zoom levels, and there’s obvious software intervention.

The competition has worked hard to make big-screen foldable phone cameras perform at the same level as cameras on flagship non-folding phones. Vertu hasn’t worried about such things, and the Pixel 10a’s camera should vastly outperform it.

It’s 2026, and the Vertu Alphafold arrives with Android 15 installed, when Google is sending out Android 17 to the Google Pixel 10 Pro Fold. It’s not a good look, and if you’ve been using Android 16, you will notice a downgrade in design and responsiveness.

Vertu’s interface isn’t extensive, and Android looks and operates in a standard fashion. There are no odd menu arrangements; I like that it’s a single pull-down notification shade, and Google Discover is where I expect it to be.

What you do get is a host of pre-installed Vertu apps. I’ll talk about Hermes AI next, but you also have a clock, weather, and file manager app, along with shortcuts to the AI voice recorder, AI image and audio editor, a cloud storage app, and an app to connect to Vertu’s wearables.

Keeping with the trend of slightly old tech, the Alphafold uses a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite processor. It comes with 16GB of RAM and 1TB of internal storage space.

An older flagship processor is still a flagship processor, and I’ve had no problems with overall performance. It has been hot where I live, and the phone did get warm to the touch when I was out taking photos, but it has not overheated.

The Snapdragon 8 Elite has always been a strong phone processor, and it shows here. The Alphafold played Asphalt 9 at high settings, and the game was fast and exciting, and switching between apps felt effortless. If this were a budget big-screen foldable released in 2026, I’d be very happy with it.

The Alphafold’s AI features run smoothly, but aren’t especially fast, something that would probably be fixed with a more recent processor tuned for AI performance. The screens are bright, and the video looks good, plus the speakers are loud, so watching movies is fun.

Vertu promises five years of security updates, but has not committed to any major OS updates. It would not provide a release date for Android 16 when asked. Vertu claims it puts stability over rushing to put out the latest OS release.

Hermes AI is the Alphafold’s big feature. It’s an AI system designed for high-level business professionals who are so busy, they need AI to help ensure everything is taken care of on their phone, as they are whisked from one meeting to the next in a Maybach or Gulfstream.

For a lowly pleb such as myself, this makes it hard to test Hermes’ true ability. However, that doesn’t stop me from trying out the features, using the AI, and exploring the Hermes AI app. After all, if it does the basics well, then it should do the complicated things pretty well, too.

The design of the Hermes AI app is odd. It’s not very “professional” and is instead a confusing dashboard of different sub-apps, options, and shortcuts. It’s not a good sign when there’s a shortcut to the flashlight in an app for CEOs.

There’s a dizzying array of AI chatbots spread across different sub-apps, and it’s hard to know why you’d want to use one over another.

The “Chairman’s toolbox” has an AI chatbot that gives legal advice, a chatbot to analyze data, and an investment chatbot, too. Elsewhere, you can pick your AI concierge, a famous Vertu feature where you’d call an actual person on the phone, where now it’s a bit of both, blending an AI chatbot with human assistance.

I’m sure that if you filled your phone with all the documents and information required to run a business, the AI may be able to help find details and summarize data for you. It’s what AI is good at.

Want to do more, and I didn’t get the impression Hermes would do anything that couldn’t be done with Gemini, Claude, or ChatGPT. For the most part, the AI chatbots seemed to be based on DeepSeek.

It’s also padded with AI fluff. Do CEOs want to use AI to make images or create music? There’s an entire app offering the service, if so. Do you want to use an AI chatbot to start Google Maps navigation, rather than just doing it yourself? That’s what the Travel sub-app in Hermes AI does.

Want an AI voice note recorder? That’s the Vemory app. It provides a transcript and a summary, and will extract a to-do list, but on my review phone, the recording limit is just 15 minutes, which seems a bit tight. The recording is also processed in the cloud, extending the time it takes to get the summary, and opening up concerns over privacy.

There’s an astonishingly optimistic “tasks completed, time saved” counter on the main screen, which is the perfect illustration of why we shouldn’t rely on AI. The first task I did was to open a menu called Morning, and ask it to tell me the weather.

It took probably 20 or 30 seconds to think about it before it just opened the weather app and showed me the local forecast. The counter recognized my task and claimed to have saved me five minutes by using Hermes to complete the task.

I encountered various bugs and design issues. for example, after Vertu account is required to use any of the AI features, and despite having an email and a Google login feature, only setting up an account with my phone number worked.

Once set up, the Hermes AI app worked sporadically until an update improved reliability, and it disliked connecting over my home Wi-Fi for some reason. When you use the chat feature on the open screen, the keyboard obscures the text entry window, so you have no idea what you’re typing. There are spelling mistakes (Hermers?), and at times, one AI chatbot directs you to use another. It all feels disconnected and unpolished.

The argument could be made that I haven’t used Hermes AI to run my (imaginary) business, but the thing is, there’s nothing at all in the Hermes AI app that encourages me to use it more, much less entrust my livelihood to it.

The Alphafold has a 6,500mAh silicon-carbon battery inside with 65W wired charging. Overall, the performance is adequate, but it’s not going to challenge the top models in either category.

Battery life has not been stellar. I’ve seen about three to four hours of screen time on a single charge, including about 30 minutes of gaming, using the camera, AI, and social apps. It’s not terrible, but it’s far from leading the space.

Charging the battery using an Anker charger showed an average of around 45W. It reached 75% after about 50 minutes, and went on to 100% in about 80 minutes.

To answer the question about whether the Alphafold is a luxury product, we have to leave aside the old processor, old software, and AI of questionable usefulness. Even if they were up-to-date, they still wouldn’t contribute to a luxury feel.

Instead, it needs to be desirable, indulgent, and enviable. Vertu gets the presentation right, with a soft-lined flip-up box and a host of accessories, so it feels special when you first get the phone. But it loses its sheen as time goes on.

At an event during my review period, I showed the Alphafold to a table of people. None knew the Vertu name, and hadn’t held a big-screen folding phone before.

Everyone was taken by the folding action — just like they would have been if I handed them a Galaxy Z Fold 7 — but not one of them thought the phone felt luxurious, and none could believe the price.

This is a problem. If your peers don’t consider your $6,800 phone luxurious or enviable, it will affect the way you view it. I feel it’s a phone that’s purchased as much for the clout as it is for the (mediocre) performance.

What I will say is that this is an exclusive product, but due to price rather than anything else. You probably won’t encounter many others in the wild. But unlike a Rolex or a Hermes bag, you’ll have to explain why it’s exclusive and expensive to anyone willing to listen. Unfortunately, the Vertu Alphafold hasn’t hit the luxury spot for me, and I question whether it will for anyone.

No, you shouldn’t buy the Vertu Alphafold. If you want a big-screen folding phone, every single model released over the last two years is a far better choice, performance and ability-wise. The Find N6, Magic V6, and Galaxy Z Fold 7’s hardware is more modern and more durable, too.

If you want a luxury product, it’s probably best not to go looking for a so-called luxury smartphone at all. Get a phone that works well for you, and buy an accepted luxury product like a watch, bag, piece of jewelry, clothes, or if your pockets are really deep, a car or a boat instead.

The problem hit home when I dug out a Tecno Phantom V Fold, a foldable from 2023 which, outside of being only slightly heavier and thicker, isn’t dramatically different to hold and use. It cost about $1,100 at the time, and the fluffy rear panel is just as tactile as calfskin.

A $6,800 folding phone made in 2026 should blow the Phantom V Fold away. The fact it doesn’t, hardware-wise, and the AI struggles to entice you into experimenting with it more deeply, tells you all you need to know.

A $6,880 folding phone will be a hard sell almost regardless of its spec or ability. The Vertu Alphafold doesn’t help itself with outdated elements and hardware that has been superseded. The business-orientated AI is an interesting idea, but on the surface it struggles to engage, putting you off from experimenting more. Buy a foldable for a third of the price instead.