The gold plating can be customized by each buyer

Nov 3, 2014 13:49 GMT  ·  By

If you thought the BlackBerry Passport isn’t unique enough, then you should definitely go for the gold-plated version of the smartphone, which is now available for purchase in Vietnam.

The company that made gold-plated Bold 9900, Torch 9810 and Q10 possible, Karalux is back again with yet another luxury version of another BlackBerry smartphone, the Passport.

The Passport was released on the market last month and it’s already a hard to come by smartphone. BlackBerry confirmed it decided to play safe and order a lower amount of Passport units, which seems to have been depleted in a matter of several days.

The more reason for Karalux to try and make a buck by customizing the Passport with gold pieces for those looking for something to stand out.

First of all, Karalux usually does these gold-plated versions of BlackBerry Passport at customer’s request, which means if you have the money you can customize it the way you want.

Depending on the gold quality and level of customization, like carved messages, business logos of motifs that you want to be etched on your Passport smartphones, the gold-plated BlackBerry Passport may be cheaper or more expensive.

Here is what Nguyen Ngoc, chief engineer at Karalaux, has to say about the whole process of gold plating the BlackBerry Passport, “We spend from 3 to 4 straight working hours to finish all stages from disassembling to gold-plating. And the cost of this gold-plated version is from 8 to 10 million dong, depending on the sophisticated level and kind of gold which customer requires.”

Depending on the level of customization, you can pay more or less on the gold-plated version

As you can see in the video below, one of the cheaper versions of this customized version of BlackBerry Passport has standard frame replaced with one made of gold. However, the price can go higher as mentioned earlier, depending on what you really want for your Passport.

“Especially, customers can also require carving messages, business logo or motif on the phone to raise its luxury,” concluded Ngoc.

The video also shows how the BlackBerry Passport is disassembled which is no small feat, especially that it takes at least 3 hours to replace the frame of the smartphone with one made of gold.

For the time being, the luxury version of BlackBerry Passport is only available in Vietnam, but international customers may be able to order one soon.

And in case you just want to know how to disassemble your BlackBerry Passport, the 24-minute video should give you all the necessary info.