While gold-colored smartphones are nothing new, they certainly seemed to catch on in 2013. Apple made a splash with their gold or “champagne” colored iPhone 5s, and Samsung released a curious gold-colored flip phone with smartphone innards, the Galaxy Golden. A few 24-carat gold encrusted smartphones released as well, with the HTC One and BlackBerry Q10 becoming the kings of bling.
We’ve rounded up the top gold-colored smartphones from 2013 for your reading pleasure. Enjoy!
1. Samsung Galaxy S4 Gold Edition
The Samsung Galaxy S4 Gold Edition was released in the UAE just a few weeks before the iPhone 5s and 5c launch on September 8th. The shiny GS4 touts the same innards as the less blinged out GS4 units, and come in two colors, Gold Pink or Gold Brown. We haven’t seen the gold GS4 units break out into the rest of the world, and it’s doubtful that they will.
2. iPhone 5S
Apple decided to go a different route this year and release two versions of the iPhone, the iPhone 5s and the iPhone 5c. While the lower-end iPhone 5c comes in a variety of colorful options, the iPhone 5s comes with three more muted color options. One of them is champagne, or as the rest of us know it, gold. The gold iPhone 5s was the most popular unit at time of release, and still garners fans today.
Not content with just a gold-colored iPhone 5s, a 24-carat gold unit was released as well. Gold Genie released the unit, which carriers a pricetag of $3,300. Wowza!
3. BlackBerry Q10
BlackBerry rebranded and released a few handsets of its own this year, with the big ones being the BlackBerry Q10 and the Z10. Suffice to say, BlackBerry hasn’t been doing too well this year, posting major losses, laying off workers and even gaining a new CEO. BlackBerry’s downfall hasn’t stopped hardcore BlackBerry fans from purchasing the devices, and certainly hasn’t stopped the production of this 24-carat gold BlackBerry Q10. This unit carries a pricetag of around $2500.
The BlackBerry Q10 has a full QWERTY keyboard, runs on a dual-core 1.5GHz Snapdragon S4 Pro processor, 2GB of RAM, 16GB of internal storage, an 8MP rear-facing camera and a 2MP front facing camera
4. HTC One
HTC’s flagship HTC One received both a 18-carat gold and gold-colored makeover this year. After showing up in Finland in late November, HTC officially announced the gold colored HTC One on November 25th, and is currently available in Europe. As for the 18-carat gold version, good luck getting your hands on that one: only five of the units are in existence, and were given out as awards at the Music Of Black Origin festival in Glasgow. The 18-carat gold unit comes in at around $4,422.
5. Samsung Galaxy Golden
Samsung released another gold device in 2013, and its got us scratching our heads. The Galaxy Golden was launched solely in Korea, and packs smartphone components into a clamshell body. Crazy, right? Leave it to Samsung to pull of something this weird.
And it’s no slouch, either. Specs wise, it comes with two 3.7-inch WVGA touchscreens, 1.7GHz dual-core processor, 8-megapixel rear and 1.9-megapixel front cameras, LTE connectivity support, 1,820mAh battery and a memory card slot. In addition, the Galaxy Golden also ships with an array of preloaded software like S Health, business card reader, Samsung Hub, and Easy Mode.
So that’s it, the top 5 gold smarpthones of 2013! Are there any gold-colored mobile devices you didn’t see on the list and would like to mention? We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.