Red Bend to Provide Over-the-Air Updates for Vertu's High-end Mobile Phones

According to Bain & Company, worldwide luxury goods continue to see double-digit annual growth; the global market now tops $264 billion. One of the luxurious items available for sale in this market is the Vertu smartphone, which can be yours between $10,155 and $453,000. While most of us will never spend $10,000 for a phone, the company is doing brisk business with annual revenue of more than $300 million. After abandoning the Nokia OS, the company adopted the Android platform to give its customers more options. Along with this change, it has also partnered with Red Bend Software, a provider of Mobile Software Management (MSM) solutions.

Red Bend Software enables more than 1.75 billion devices around the world to supply Firmware Over-the-Air (FOTA) updating solutions for high-end phones.

Vertu is continuing the tradition of only the best available materials in its phones by using Red Bend. The Red Bend software management center will be delivering new software updates and support the phones across all platforms.

The FOTA platform makes its updates by calculating the difference between old and new firmware versions by providing a set of tools which allows the configuration manager to recognize contributions or changes made to the OEM by software developers. This ensures the right updates are always installed on the device.

"Vertu customers expect an exceptional level of service and reliability; by working with Red Bend we can ensure that we are able to deliver product software improvements and a premium user experience continuously, with the easiest, fastest and most trusted FOTA updates," said Vertu’s Head of Software, Mal Minhas.

Vertu has three models – Vertu Ti, Signature and Constellation –  and each phone is assembled by one craftsman to ensure quality. The phones are made using the best materials including sapphire screens, fine leathers and grade-five titanium used on the phones exterior casing as well as custom materials at the request of the client. The phones are available in 70 Vertu Boutiques and select stores in 66 countries.

The end-to-end solution from Red Bend allows manufacturers to independently manage different types of software and applications, whether embedded or downloaded, on any device and platform at any time with a centralized and uniform control. The MSM collects data from the device including application behavior, device configuration and settings, device and network diagnostics, software inventory and usage analytics.