In Romania, France Telecom operates as Orange SA and has seen its revenues dwindling over the past two years with heavy competition coming from the Greek-owned Cosmote as well as many smaller emerging mobile operators such as RCS-RDS.

With Middle East and African markets on a surge, France Telecom will likely choose to shift its attention there.

Given that there’s a whole luxury market out there, making a responsible choice definitely falls on the shoulders of the luxury consumer. On the other side, producers offer a range of luxury products, each aimed at a category of customers. Since today’s luxury market is combining style with usability, it only makes sense. You can take the iPhone (for example), a gadget that has been styled by various designers. Whether cased in gold or silver, adorned with diamonds or displaying elvish silver designs, this mobile phone retains its main qualities, resulting in a high-tech luxurious piece of mobile technology.

But every now and then something comes up that is by definition so retarded, so imbecile, that one simply has to stop and pay homage to a device that seems to have been created by a category of people that we Romanians proudly call “cocalari” or “pitzi”.

Meet Vertu. Vertu is Nokia’s luxury brand. It’s the same Nokia that has given us the N71, alongside a plethora of award-wining gadgets. But when it comes to luxury, Nokia’s Vertu goes by this recipe: take a Neanderthalian phone, encase it in gold and/or diamonds, make an Adobe Flash website and sell it.

Features? Nothing. They boast USB and Bluetooth as if there has been a phone sold in the last few years without these. You don’t get a data cable with any of the Vertu phones. The camera is crap. The battery barely holds. There is no touchscreen on any of the models (so why do you get a crappy battery, you ask? wait and see). The design itself is horrible.

And all of them are bricks. Literally. What do you expect when you put gold on a phone? Obviously, you can’t get it to weigh under 150 grams and just a few stay under 200. Cue: that’s why you don’t get a usable battery, a good battery would add weight.

Presumably, the filthy rich clientele would be businessmen but there’s no business feature on these phones. Large screens, Wi-Fi connectivity, word processing, rich email clients (just regular ones), custom applications … there’s nothing. In fact, the one business feature that Nokia offers is not phone-related: with every Vertu you get concierge service (when you travel – although being rich and all I would assume you already have a permanent service already).

A Vertu is a phone that justifies buying a Hummer just to carry it around. You put it in the glove compartment, then the Nokia-provided butler carries it for you to your diner table, shows it off to your guests then put it back. Given that the only thing this phone does right is the fact that you can talk (also giving your wrists a work-out due to its weight), there’s no real reason to have it around except so that your friends can give it a good one-around looksie before you take out your actual business phone which most likely costs at least 100 times less.

In short: if you buy a Vertu, you’re retarded, no matter how much money you have. Gates has a Blackberry and Windows Phone, Jobs has a few iPhones. If you really want to showcase money, then buy a gold bar. It has the same features as a Vertu but at least your tech-savvy friends won’t think you’re retarded.

For example: you pose them a simple question such as When will the mobile handset Samsung Galaxy S (which is in your offer marked as unavailable at the moment) be available?

They say this:
Cher client, La diversité et le nombre de mobiles, forfaits et options proposés par Orange ne me permettent pas de vous donner une réponse complète par mail. Je vous invite à consulter notre site Orange.fr ou à vous rendre dans une agence France télécom pour obtenir tous les renseignements nécessaires à votre choix.

Which means:
Dear customer, it seems that the hostile weather conditions are preventing us from exercising our cognitive abilities. Or simply we just don't feel like typing. Since you seem to believe that we actually offer what's displayed on our site, we deem you to be too stupid to use our services and therefore you should be banned from using internet altogether. Please go away.

The peak of the Orange kind of stupidity is that said mobile handset (Samsung Galaxy S) is promoted continuously on their first page as a super mega offer (which expires today) which should not be missed. However, if you do like the offer (which isn’t bad at all) and dare to click on it, you will find out that it’s unavailable. Why in all this retardness would you promote an offer that’s not available?

Counter this with the decency of Vodafone which removes unavailable offers and instead gives you the option of being notified by email whenever the offer returns.

Therefore, I will say it loudly one more time: Orange.fr sucks!