A luxury goods company is now making $19,450 luxury cell phones. The phones have not been augmented technically in any way, just been made very expensive by plastering old-world design values on the outside.

Style matters of course, but the complete lack of technical excellence in the product makes it look like stone age arrowheads made from green bottle glass to me. A meaningless artifact made by and for somebody left behind by the modern world, to - by appearance only - adapt to something new that is simply beyond the comprehension of the makers and users.

While there's a beatiful embedded statement about tradition and the resilience of cultures in this, the flip-side of that statement - the inability to understand rapid change - is really the important one. It doesn't help any Nokia is involved in the making of this phone. That only tells us that technology is really boring right now.