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There was plenty to see at Dreame’s local product showcase: the stair-climbing Cyber X robot vacuum cleaner, a handful of Dyson hair styling dupes, a wandering air purifier, and a concept car - all in various stages of becoming real products you can buy. Perhaps the most contradictory of the 40-odd products on display were the Aurora phones.
Encased in glass, with no obvious door to access the devices, these audacious pieces were more museum artifacts than mobile phones. I asked if I could touch them, and was promptly told no. After a bit more questioning, the Dreame rep told me that the ones behind the glass are just models - fake phones, but the diamonds and gold on them are real.
There were no available specs for the phones themselves. I queried who was making the camera sensors, what kind of processor we could expect, but I couldn’t get a straight answer. The closest I got was a vague promise that Dreame would be using “the best manufacturers” for everything. But when it came to the bling, there was plenty to talk about.
Dreame plans to make the Aurora collection its premium phone offering, but seemingly, that comes from the packaging more than the mechanics. Each of these phones is fully customisable and will be made bespoke. Buyers can pick the leather used on the back of the Luxe Loop Sanctuary, and the carat and weight of the gold casing on the back of the Noble Gleam. Each of the phones is diamond-encrusted, with up to 198 jewels embedded around the camera bump. By this point, I was starting to understand why I wasn’t allowed to pick them up.
Their price was as shrouded in secrecy as the rest of the specs. Since these can be made bespoke, the overall cost differs depending on how much you’re looking to ball out, but Dreame also couldn’t offer me a baseline starting price. Assuming the specs are somewhat comparable to your usual Android flagship, like the Galaxy S26, my wild guess is the phones themselves will probably sit at around the $1,500 mark before any gold or diamonds.
Gold is trading for $6,383.11 per ounce today, so the 16g of it used in the Luxe Loop would set you back $3,649. Add in the diamond ring around the camera bump, and the cost of the leather, and you’re looking at something close to the cost of a used Corolla.
There was a lot of contradictory information going around about these phones on the night. According to the on-stage presentation, the Aurora phones are coming to Australia and New Zealand in a “very short period”, while the booth rep told me you could already order them with a six-month wait, and the PR team called them “aspirational concepts”. I did learn that a handful of them are already being made, which does make them more real than the car, which allegedly should hit our shores within 18 months.
The concept of the Aurora phones is an interesting resurgence of phones as a status symbol. We had a few years in the 2010s when phone design was more than just a black rectangle, and the design you picked said something about you. Hiptops meant you were young and cool, Blackberries meant you meant business, Nokias meant you valued reliability and that you really liked Snake. In the days of black rectangle vs. black rectangle, we’ve traded that spark for necessity. The Aurora phones look to push back against this, in the most gaudy way possible.
One of the custom Aurora phones, so I’m told, uses 100g of gold to make a dragon on the back. All I could think was how impractical that extra weight would be, but that isn’t the point. The point is showing that you can afford the impractical. Dreame’s Aurora range promises to be an “if you know you know” kind of flex - like tailored pants without belt loops, or a menu with no prices. A dog whistle of wealth.
Disclosure: This author travelled to Melbourne as a guest of Dreame for its event
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Anula Wiwatowska
Offsite Editorial Lead | Instagram
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