Tonino Lamborghini Antares smartphone review

If you’ve ever thought that Samsung’s and Apple’s top-end smartphones just aren’t exclusive enough for you, then the Tonino Lamborghini Antares Android phone could be just what you’re looking for. Available for £2,500 exclusively through Carphone Warehouse at Selfridges, the Antares is designed for the rich.

To that end, the phone isn’t designed to have the latest, highest specifications, but it aims to please with its high-end design instead. In truth, there’s nothing else quite like it.

Made from stainless steel, the Antares has a PVD coating, which makes the surface tougher, but also allows Tonino Lamborghini to provide colour options. It’s available in rose gold, gold, black and stainless steel. There’s also a choice of leather colours for the back panel.

We have to say that it looks pretty good in the flesh, with the rose gold model catching our attention in particular. With its angled edges and metal grilles, it’s fair to say that we’ve not seen a phone like the Antares before and it’s one of the most attractive handsets that we’ve seen.

Part of the cost comes down to the expense of making the phone look the way it does. In fact, the handset has to be manufactured to a slightly larger size, so that when it’s been hand-polished and metal removed in the process, it still all fits together.

Using stainless steel does have a slight weigh disadvantage, with the phone weighing 170g. Considering there’s only a 4in screen, that’s quite a bit of bulk.

Inside, the specs don’t match those of the latest handsets, such as the Samsung Galaxy S5. Its 4in screen has only a qHD resolution (960×540), lagging behind the Full HD screens we’re used to seeing. Given the comparatively smaller screen size, compared to the current crop of Android handsets, pixel density is still a respectable 274ppi; it looked fairly sharp from our brief interaction with it.

There’s a 1.5GHz quad-core processor and 2GB of RAM, although we couldn’t run any benchmarks, as the handset wasn’t connected to the internet. 32GB of storage is standard onboard, with a 32GB micro SD card provided in the box.

Things are altogether better with the camera. The Sony-manufactured model has a 13-megapixel resolution, so should be capable of capturing some high-detail shots. You also get a Yamaha amplifier and speakers for audio, although we’ll need to test these out in more detail to find out if they’re any better than the audio kit that comes with other smartphones.

Android 4.2 is installed, although the company will roll out Android 4.4 when it feels that the newer OS is stable enough. While Android mostly remains the same, Tonino Lamborghini has added its own icons and applications to the phone. For example, you get a special Antares browser. However, as Google won’t let people mess with the apps that should ship with Android, you also get the regular version of Chrome. This happens with some other apps, so your phone ends with two apps to do the same job: one Google and one Tonino Lamborghini. It’s good to see that there’s full access to the Google Play store, so you download and install any of the thousands of Android applications available on it.

Available now from Selfridges, the Antares is a limited edition handset, with each model stamped with a unique serial code.