Vertu Alphafold: A luxury foldable with an ambitious but unfinished AI agent

Vertu, the UK-founded luxury phone maker, has launched the Alphafold, a foldable smartphone aimed at wealthy executives. Priced from $6,880, its key differentiator is the Hermes Agent, an AI built on the open-source Hermes project. Hermes is designed to automate multi-step workflows across apps, analyze documents, and escalate requests to a human concierge when needed.

Physically, the Alphafold is wrapped in genuine calfskin leather with titanium accents and weighs 264 grams, about 50 grams more than the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 7. The packaging resembles a jewelry case and includes a leather sleeve and charging cables. However, hardware similarities to the $1,100 ZTE Nubia Fold were noted, including hinge design, speaker placement, and fingerprint reader position. Vertu confirmed to TechCrunch that the Alphafold was developed through a supply-chain partnership using ZTE/Nubia's hardware platform, with Vertu responsible for luxury materials, software, and quality control.

Testing the Hermes Agent revealed mixed results. For example, when asked to message a contact about being 20 minutes late, enable Do Not Disturb, open navigation, and set a reminder, Hermes completed some tasks but failed to start navigation and set the reminder for the wrong time. In contrast, Samsung's Galaxy Z Fold 7 with Gemini asked clarifying questions and produced more accurate results. For a business trip planning task, Hermes could not find suitable flights and created a calendar entry with incorrect dates. While analyzing a locally saved spreadsheet, Hermes initially summarized figures correctly but later failed to recognize the same document days later.

Vertu claims conversations with Hermes are encrypted and not used to train public AI models. The device features a dedicated A5 security chip for hardware-level protection. Battery life exceeded one day during testing, but the lack of wireless charging is a notable omission at this price point.

Overall, Hermes is an ambitious but unfinished AI agent. Its autonomy sometimes leads to inaccurate outputs, though Vertu is actively updating the platform, so the experience may improve. Specialist AI agents for legal and investment advice should be treated as starting points rather than authoritative sources.