Name: MKBHD Let me borrow his $5000 dollar smartphone
Uploaded: 2026-02-12T21:32:22.000Z
Duration: 10 min 52 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Once upon a time, my good friend MKBHD decided to buy a $5,380 smartphone.

Adverbs of manner

It's called the Virtu Agent Q, which supposedly is the world's first ultra premium AI agent phone for entrepreneurs and has a very lucrative promise of literal gold plated interiors.

But he found out that the phone is kind of a little bit of a scam.

I asked Marques if I could borrow the phone since I really like Destro making phone calls.

I just want to see what it's made of on the inside.

Look, maybe if there's real gold inside, MKBHD can get some of his money back.

And there's only one way to find out for sure.

I'm really doing him a favor if you think about it.

At first glance though, the $5,380 virtue agent Q phone is falling apart without me even doing anything.

There is a shiny red button over here on the left.

This apparently lets you instantly chat with AI or a real person to book hotels and buy you stuff.

I'll find out if it's still linked to Marques's credit card later.

You might think that a $5,000 smartphone would have some top of the line material on the screen like sapphire or diamonds or something.

But as we work our way up through the Mohs scale of hardness, we see that the VIR2Q is using regular tempered glass.

We which scratches at a level six with deeper grooves at a level seven.

Now, one of the main selling points listed on this rather strange virtue website is that the phone has a ceramic Pillow forged at 1200 degrees Celsius for Jade like warmth.

First of all, jade is not warm and a ceramic pillow is a misnomer.

But ceramic material is forged at 1,200 degrees Celsius.

Pulling out my diamond tester tool to double check the glass.

Just for fun, if the screen or back camera lens were sapphire, it would trigger my diamond tester tool, just like we see on this Tissot watch face.

We'll come back to that ceramic pillow in a second.

What Vertu doesn't appear to be fibbing about though, is the calfskin leather on the back.

Apparently calfskin is one of the more expensive and luxurious leathers but it's also not as resistant to scratching and scuffing and it would definitely not be my first choice for a phone material.

Fully grown cowhide leather is far superior and way more resilient as any cowboy can attest.

But exploiting younglings is something billionaires just can't get enough of.

So calfskin it is something Virtu definitely needs more of though is glue, since the reason our ceramic pillow is lifting off it's because Vertu only applied glue to the left half of the ceramic pillow during the build process.

Not super great, but if we just put it back quickly, maybe Marques won't notice.

The sides of the Vertu Agent Q are made with stainless steel and each of the side panels appear to be screwed in place with stainless steel screws.

The 65 watt USB C charging port is on the top right side so you can look like a psychopath while charging your phone.

On the left side we have a volume rocker and the red Magic agent button.

I still might push this later just to see what happens.

And again, it looks like the leather on the back of the phone is legit stitching and all the stitching pulls back through the leather in the same way it was mechanically added in the first place.

With the red leather wrapping around the bottom edge of the phone where the charging port is usually supposed to be.

There are two Falcon wing flaps on the back.

There's no expandable memory cards, but there is 1 TB in total of built in storage.

The top right camera is a 50 megapixel main unit, then a 54 megapixel telephoto camera in the center and a 50 megapixel ultra wide came camera right above the dual LED flash that's nestled between the two Falcon wings.

This would be a pretty unique phone if it was like 500 bucks or something, but

they added one too many zeros for my taste.

Good thing it's not your phone then, huh?

The 6 inch 1080p 120Hz AMOLED display does last for more than 23 seconds under the heat from my lighter without sustaining any permanent damage.

So it's got that going for it, which is nice.

Finally though, it's time to see how a ridiculously expensive smartphone fares in the Bend test.

With the stainless steel sides being screwed on and segmented, it'll be interesting to see what happens.

And just like we would expect, separation immediately appears right at the antenna line.

Remember this $5,000 smartphone is not water resistant, so we aren't compromising any ingress protection with this new gap.

Since it never had any to begin with, you can't lose what you never had.

But alas, even though the virtuagent Q is permanently kinked, it is still alive.

Which means it's time to harvest up all the gold remaining inside.

If, and that's a very big if there is any to be found in the first place.

Even though Vertu said it is in there, I have my doubts.

Just a few screws hold down the stainless steel rails to the foam body.

We have both red and blue loctite on the screws at the same time.

There's nothing wrong with more than one layer of protection.

Speaking of multiple layers of protection, you might have thought I was at home making this video, which indeed I am.

But the government thinks I'm currently in Greenland, which might explain some things.

A VPN or virtual private Network allows me to be anywhere I want to in the world without ever leaving my house.

With a VPN I can watch geo locked content or just avoid getting put on a list while I search the informational schematics of a guillotine, as one sometimes does.

NordVPN scrambles my Internet traffic, so from the outside no one can see what I'm doing or where I'm at, since NordVPN has 8,900 servers in more than 180 locations.

And just like the theoretical gold that we're looking for inside the phone is being physically protected by modular bumpers and double thread lock screws.

NORDVPN is a world leader in online protection.

You can try nordvpn with a 30 day money back guarantee with the link in my description nordvpn.com jerryrig you can even get a dedicated IP address, an ad blocker scam, call protection, and

you can protect up to 10 devices with one account.

NordVPN.com JerryRig get four months extra on a two year plan and hopefully we find more than two bucks worth of gold inside the Virtu agent Q.

The side panels appear to clip into some gold contact pads inside the phone frame, probably so they can help transmit signal better for the phone calls and data.

But seeing gold so near the frame makes me think we might be about to strike the motherlode.

With the left side rails off, the red agent button comes loose and surprisingly extremely surprisingly, this button is actually sapphire.

But before Marques gets too excited, natural rubies this size might go for a hundred bucks or so, but

lab grown rubies this size go for about five bucks, which is what I'm betting this one is.

So far we've recouped about.0943% of MKBHD's purchase price.

Inside the falcon wings are more stainless steel screws.

About seven more screws are found under the top leather portion, and

even more unfortunately, placed screws are found underneath the camera lens glass.

Virtue's definitely not winning any repairability awards with this one.

But finally the back panel comes off, revealing no gold.

We were expecting a cave of wonders and all we got was a cave of plunders.

The image on the website shows some Fort Knox level adornment, but

inside, Vertu isn't even pretending to have any gold.

To be fair, I'm probably the only person on the planet who would actually go and check for the gold.

So virtu had a 1 in 8 billion chance of no one finding out.