The Vergecast - We finally have a Trump Phone | The Vergecast Livestream

Episode Date: July 6, 2026

We've been tracking the Trump Phone for more than a year. We weren't sure it was real, or that it would ever ship — and we were pretty darn sure it wasn't going to be made in America. Whatever the Trump Phone is, though? We finally got our hands on one. Dom Preston and some other Verge friends will join David to talk about the device, our first impressions, and whether this is could be the best phone of 2026. (Just kidding.) Further reading: ⁠I finally got my Trump phone⁠ Subscribe to The Verge for unlimited access to theverge.com, subscriber-exclusive newsletters, and our ad-free podcast feed.We love hearing from you! Email your questions and thoughts to [e-mail] or call us at 866-VERGE11. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

One day, with the help of science, you might be able to live forever. Forever. Your body will just need a couple tune-ups. Injecting bone marrow in your 40s, your kidney in your 50s, your heart in your 60s, and so on, and then potentially a whole body transplant by the time that you were 90. This week on Explain It to Me, The Quest for Longevity. Find new episodes, Sundays, wherever you get your podcasts. Hello and welcome to the Vergecast,

flagship podcast of two-year-old mobile processors. I'm your friend David Pierce. Don Preston is here. Hi, Dom. Hey, how are you? Dom, it happened. It really happened. Finally.

Listen, I just want everyone to understand what I assume must have been a truly remarkable 48 hours in your life. Wimbledon is happening. England played one of like the all-time great World Cup games. And most importantly, your life. as a reporter is complete because you got a Trump phone. This happened. I had the T1 phone, 8,002,0002, brackets, gold version, closed brackets,

by my side the whole time through this glorious weekend. It's been a real treat. I honestly wonder to this. I have a lot of thoughts about this phone. You and I both have them. We've both been playing with them. I have developed many theories about this phone. But I honestly want to know,

you have been covering this thing. I would say partially against your will. For literally the last 12 months, what was it like to honestly get this thing in your hands? Was it a weird experience to be like, oh, this thing is actually real? It was very strange. When the, you know, I kind of had the FedEx shipping notification.

And so then when my buzzer from my apartment rang, I kind of, you know, let the guy into the building and then like turned to my partner and said, it's here. And she looked at me with the most confusing. Like, what is here? The gold phone. It's arrived.

It was like Christmas morning. You know, this thing I'd be waiting for for so long finally turned up. And then, yeah, I mean, just very surreal, getting this thing, unboxing it, getting my, you know, first grab of this strange, slightly tacky, slightly sticky, sheenie, very, very cheap feeling, slightly off-gold phone that kind of manages to really overwhelm immediately in a whole lot of ways at once. But what a treat to actually be underwhelmed in person now? Let's talk about the underwhelming thing about it, because I had...

specific expectations about what I expected this phone to sort of do to me when I booted it up. And the actual reality of this phone is nothing like it. I mean, like the running joke of this has been, right? If this whole thing is a grift, there's going to be a massive amount of stuff installed. There's going to be just trump junk everywhere. It's going to be just absolutely riddled with crap that you don't want. And to a genuinely shocking extent, that is not. the case. There is in fact one wallpaper installed, which is very fine. They paid some wallpaper

designer, and by some wallpaper designer, I mean someone with five minutes on their hands to make a just a blue wallpaper that says Trump Mobile in the middle. And that's the only wallpaper. It's the only one you need, David. I don't know what else you want from your phone. There is just this one wallpaper. There are two pre-installed apps that would not have come on just like a bang standard Android phone. One is truth social, of course, which is just terrific and hilarious. The other one is Doctegety, which is a telehealth app, which is a big part of the Trump mobile idea, too, with the Trump mobile plan, you also get Doctegety. I will say it is not clear whether you get Doctegetty for free through Trump mobile. I have heard some people say that I have, I confess that I got a ways

down the sign up flow to the point where it wanted me to pay $29, and then I would have had to go back and activate the thing. And I don't, I'm not that good a journalist. But was the relative simplicity of this phone surprising to you the same way it was to me? Yeah, I mean, I kind of known this was coming just from, you know, I've obviously been picking apart every scrap of information I can get on this. And we've seen a couple other journalists get this. So I kind of knew some of what was coming here. But it is so close to a stock Android experience. It's one of the odd things about this phone, but in a weird way, this is the phone a lot of Android nerds have been asking for for a long time. It's a phone with a headphone jack. It's a phone with a

micro-sd card slot. It's a phone with a notification LED. It runs like almost pure stock Android with very little, like, I said very little stuff installed. There are fewer extra pre-installed apps than you'll get on any Samsung, Xiaomi, you know, Motorola or whatever. From one angle, you can look at this and say, wow, this is like the Android nerds dream device. Trump Mobile did it. They made the perfect Android phone. Yeah, let's talk about the other angle. What's the other angle? I mean, the big obvious angle is that, like, there are some bits of this hardware that are okay. I mean, I just said some, but even just, you know, you look at some of the specs and it, it's fine. It's not great, but it's fine. The big thing with this phone is,

I have zero confidence it will get a single software update, let alone several years worth of software updates and ongoing support. Like, my one currently says it has a February security patch and tells me it's up to date. It's on Android 15 rather than 16. When I, you know, because I get to this later probably, but I chatted to two Trump mobile executives back in February. And one of the things I asked them at that point was like, what is your software support promise?

You know, how long are you going to keep giving this phone updates? And they were genuinely just confused by the question. Like, it's not like they said, oh, we're not going to. They just were like, what do you mean? Like, yeah, it's got Android. It's got Android 15. And the idea that they had to do any more than that seemed to become as a, Totally out ball out of the blue to them.

Yeah, I think this gets to kind of the big galaxy brain theory I have developed about this phone, which is this is just a fundamentally unserious phone made by a fundamentally unsurious group of people. The thing that they seem to actually care about and be trying to do is Trump mobile, right? That is real service. It is, once again, a grift on top of the T-Mobile network. That's all fine and good. It comes with a sort of bizarre-looking. SIM card. It's $47.45.45 a month. Like, whatever, Trump Mobile is the thing. This is,

if you are a MAGA person who just wants to give the Trump organization your money, Trump Mobile is the way they want to take your money. This phone may as well not exist. And I think the more I use this phone, the more I don't understand why it exists. Because actually, if you look at Trump Mobile, a big part of its thing is you can drop it into lots of different phones, right? You can bring any phone you want to Trump mobile. So the idea of of saying not only are we going to have a needlessly expensive MV&O for you, we're going to actually build a phone is so bizarre to me. Because at some point, like, you just run down the specs, right?

And it's a two-year-old chip that benchmarks, I just went through all the geek bench stuff, and it's like hilarious to look at, right? It benchmarks about half what you'll get from the pixel 10, another phone that came out. This actually technically an older phone. Yeah. It benchmarks at like almost a third of what you, would get from something like the S-25. If you go to GPU stuff, you get like several multiples higher on newer phones.

Like this is an old phone with old specs. And then you even look at the shape of it. It has that sort of like curved screen that all the Samsung phones had like 10 years ago. I just, I don't understand why it was worth any effort from them to make this phone. I think the thing that is also very interesting to me is I think if you were going to put the least imaginable amount of work, If you're like, we're going to make a phone, Dom, you and I are going to make a phone, we're going to do the least. Like, what is the easiest, most straightforward way we can possibly make a phone? I think you would end up with a phone that looks damn near exactly like this phone.

Yeah, I think it would be something similar. It's just such a straight down the line, mid-range, boring Android phone using old parts. You know, like the only things that are interesting about this hardware are the things that are dated about it. Like you said, the waterfall design like curved screen. and, you know, that headphone jack, the SD cards for. These are the only standout features, and it's just because everyone else stopped doing them, because this is presumably assembled mostly out of old parts sitting on shelves

that the ODM just had no further use for and was able to let's put this thing together on the cheap for Trump Mobile, I presume, because no one else is building a phone with this design or these specs. There is no point making one. I mean, my big theory about the whole thing, you know, to kind of what you were just talking about is, this is just a marketing stunt gone wrong.

They, the phone plan is the business. It has always been the Trump mobile business. They thought they'd get some attention by being like, I'm going to do a phone. Wow, get your Golden Trump phone. And they just seemed totally shocked by how much attention and interest it developed. I think particularly attention. I think they hate the attention.

Which is at least in part your fault. We should say very clearly. You did this, Dom. I have played my part in giving it a lot of attention and they don't like it. Yeah, again, when I spoke to them, you know, they kept trying to steer the conversation back to the phone plan. They were like, but the plan, but you know, the cell service. That's the great thing we're doing.

And I just kept being like, but the phone. Tell me about the phone. And they didn't want to talk about it. And they were very clear it wasn't really the center of their business. And I just think they thought it would be cheap and quick and easy to throw together a gold phone, pretend they made it in the US and get it out the door. And it would get them some headlines and then everyone forget. And they'd get a load more people on the cell plan.

And I think they just underestimated how much, and other sites would kind of latch onto this and be like, wait, they made a Trump phone. I want to know all about that all the time. And I think they also just separately underestimated how difficult it is to make a phone. Even if you're doing this lowest possible effort version of making a phone, it still took them a year when they clearly thought it would take them three months. Yeah.

So, okay, two questions for you coming from the chat. The first is having now touched and used the thing, the reporting for a while has been that this seems to be just basically a rebadged HTCU24 Pro. Yeah. Is that still the read? You think that's right? I'm pretty confident that is. I never personally reviewed the U24 Pro, so I haven't held that phone, but I've obviously looked at it in a lot of detail and read a lot of reviews over the last little while trying to make sense of this one.

The body, the build is identical. Anyone who watched the I look at the I Fix It tear down will know that they already pulled the two phones aside apart, side by side by side. side and made a Frankenstein phone from parts from each that still turned on because they were so fundamentally compatible. There are some innerists that have changed. The battery is different. It's a slightly bigger battery. The charges slightly more slowly. The battery is also interestingly made in the Philippines, or it claims to be made in the Philippines. And my understanding is that if Trump Mobile is sort of pushing this idea a bit that they tried to move away from more Chinese manufacturing. So I think there might be some other little components where they've kind of just

shifted supplier to a non-Chinese part supplier. But really just being like, I'm going to get this off-the-shelf piece from a slightly different company to the other one. It's not a different spec other than that one battery shift. Everything else is the exact same. So yeah, this is an H-20C, H-T-C-U-24 Pro in all but name and battery capacity. Okay. And to your point about where these things are made, we also have the question is there literally any indication that any part of the innards of the box were touched in the United States

which is a terrific version of this question. Also, we should just, while I'm sitting here, I have all the box innards. So allow me to just briefly share. So this is the box. It's black. It says Trump Mobile.

It has the correct number of stars and the wrong number of stripes. This has been litigated to death. I did count each individual star. There are 50. of them, but there are 11 stripes, which is not how many colonies there were. But anyway, this is the box. It is, I mean, it's just the least interesting phone box you can imagine. The SIM card comes in it. It really would like you to get the Trump mobile plan.

The other thing that comes in it, I would say, is the single best thing that comes with the Trump phone. And it's a gold-braided USB-C cable. Do I have any confidence that this is a good USB-C cable? I don't. But it's gold and it's braided. No, it doesn't. It doesn't. It doesn't. You could, like, I could pull this thing apart on camera, I suspect. You get that. You get a user manual. I love the user manual. Have you flipped through it? It's incredible. There's a whole page on how to send a text message, right? This is like the literal least you could do in a user manual. But there's a thing in here that I really got a kick out of that there's an indication that there should be gold buttons in here. And so I had a moment. being like, okay, this is cool. Maybe this is one deeply hilarious way in which they customize this phone, that like the send message button will

be gold instead of the normal color. It's not. It's all the same. They did nothing. But that's so you get the manual. You get this. You get the little power brick, which is also clearly just a part lifted out of a factory somewhere. And that is the entirety of it.

So to the question, Dom, is there any indication that anything in here has been touched since it entered the United States? Nothing definitive, I will say that. I don't know your phone, my phone is not going to be perceptible on the camera. My phone came with like the tiniest little scratch in one corner. Oh, I should say, I'm sorry, I missed a piece, clear case. Oh, the clear case.

So if they shipped it with the case on, it would help. So my phone has a tiny little scratch. So I've already seen people joke that that was the bit they added in the US, is the tiny little chip in the finish in the US factory. There's a sticker on the box that says assembled in the USA. proudly assembled in the USA, I'm sorry. I left off the pride. Technically outside the box, but inside the shipping package,

you get the Quick Start guide, which is separate from the user manual. What? And it's very clearly just a cheap, like, inkjet printer piece of paper. You can see all the banding and everything. So that bit, I kind of believe, was probably printed in the US. That seems plausible to me. What I actually want to do is try and measure the paper,

Because someone pointed to that, I described as A4 paper. I don't mean to interrupt. Most of this is about how to sign up for Trump mobile. Yes, it's called the T1 Quicks. It's not about the phone. It's all about the plan. Again, the plan is the only thing. That's where they think they're making the money.

Yeah, what I want to do is measure the paper. Because I described it as A4 in my piece the other day, but that's because I'm British and that's what we call our paper sizes. But of course, in the US, there's U.S. letter or something is the kind of equivalent size. And they're going to be slightly different. So measuring the size of this piece of paper might tell you, where it was printed. Is it a U.S. letter size piece of paper, or is it a sort of European or I don't even

know what, you know, the equivalent sort of Chinese paper size would be in what its measurements are. But that's the investment we can do. I can confirm it is the same size. It appears to be eight and a half by 11. Yep. It is an eight and a half by 11 piece of paper. It is normal letter paper in the United States.

Do with that what you will, everybody. Breaking news. That is different to A4. A4 is 8.3 by 11.69 inches. So it is US paper. Proudly printed. Also, this comes with a date of purchase dated June 15th, 2026, which is not remotely when we bought this phone. No.

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But if they don't, like Donald Trump, what do they prefer politically otherwise? Care about my family? I care about my country. I want people to be safe and happy where they live. Care about my wallet, too, man. I'm a Sted Herndon, and this is America Actually. Catch us every Saturday on YouTube or wherever you get your podcast. I'm Seth Matlands. My new show, Creator Destroy Reimagining Marketing Explores how every decision a company makes. Not just the marketing ones, but the HR, IR, pricing, org design, and planning ones.

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Okay, what else about this phone have you found interesting? Have you been messing with the camera at all? I have. I've taken the phone with me all weekend. I mean, as you say, the first thing before even the camera I found interesting is this phone does not work in the UK. It will not connect to anything faster than a 2G signal. So I can use it to make phone calls, but I cannot use it to access the internet.

So I'm guessing if you sign up for Trump Mobile or even try to use the T1 in the UK, it should just play the Star-Spangled Banner every time you try to do anything. It did let me set it up in UK English though. Android, they haven't like locked all the other languages out of Android at least. But yes, I can't use it with my phone. If you use a you in color,

it yells at you and shuts the phone off. That's how it should be. So I've had to take this around as a second device because it has no internet for me. It's just like a gold brick in my pocket. I love it. But I've been carrying it around. I was at a concert on Friday night.

Robin was playing at a big arena show, so I took it for that. and took some very disappointing sort of arena lighting, challenging photos, and it really failed that test very hard. Tough for any phone, to be fair. That's a hard one. I threw it in at the deep end, but I thought, you know, I'll just see what it kind of does here.

The main camera did okay. It was just the Zoom, the two-time telephoto and the Ultra Wide were kind of unusable shots as soon as it was in the dock. That also, it's worth saying, it's been Pride weekend in London. So I was at the Electropop show on Friday night before. Pride Weekend getting out my Trump phone. And the first time I took it out to take a photo, I just kind of did it like I would any other phone.

And then as I was flashing that like Trump mobile wallpaper up to everyone behind me in the crowd. And after that, so like unlocking the phone down by my waist to try and hide the big glowing Trump mobile logo. Yeah, do a real. You learn how to sort of put your hand over the bottom of it to hide that. You're like, no, it's a different gold phone. Don't worry about it.

So I took it there. I took it to the tennis. I was at Wimbledon yesterday. I was looking up to go there, so I got to take some more shots there. And it did a little better there. The lighting's easier. That was kind of in daylight. Again, the main camera was good.

I had along with me the Vivo X300 Ultra, which I think has like a credible claim to being the best camera phone at the moment. And it just felt like a wildly unfair comparison. As soon as you try to do anything further than kind of the default main camera distance, that Vivo was just kind of wiping the floor with this phone. As soon as you went beyond two times, it was just unusable photos. So actually on the specs of these, we're getting some questions about the specs of the phone, which is an unusually complicated question at this moment in time.

You, again, the answers to this question have changed a bunch over the last 12 months. No pressure if you don't, but do you happen to have the current specs in front of you? Yes. What this phone actually ostensibly is now in your hands. I have a broad sense of what this actual phone should be. Okay, hit me. We think it's powered by the Snapdragon 7 Gen 3.

That one we actually don't like know in any official channels. All Trump Mobile has ever said is a Snapdragon 7 series. But you know, you can figure out that just the 7 Gen 3s. We're pretty sure it's that. It shows up that way in the like when you run a benchmark that's the CPU it identifies,

which I think is how everybody's figuring it out. Yeah. It has a 6.78 inch 120 hertz OLED screen curved as we discussed earlier. It's got, I mean, kind of actually, The most amazing thing about it in the year of our Lord 2026 is it has 512 gigabytes of storage

and 12 gigabytes of RAM, which actually, like, they might be losing money on this thing. That might be worth the $500 literally by itself at this point. 12 gigs of RAM is like, it's gold right now. It's pretty solid. We're going to see a lot more Android phones drop down from those storage of RAM numbers this year. So this kind of is weird. They're going to stand out a little for that. Triple camera on the back, 50 megapixel, main camera, 50 megapixel, two times telephoto.

I think the ultra-wide is 8 megapixel. It also weirdly has a 50-megapixel selfie camera. That was one of the ways we originally tied this back to the HTCU24 Pro. It's a very small list of Android phones that have 50 megapixel selfie cameras. So that really helped to kind of pin it down to that. 5,000-m-amp-hour battery and 30-watt charging, I think. So, like, it's an interesting mix. And then, you know, you throw in the headphone jack,

and you get this fascinating mix of, reasonable sort of mid-range Android phone specs from today, the processor is obviously what kills it, right? Like, that's a pretty good chip from two years ago. And you can just do, you can do vastly better for less money in the year of our Lord 2026. And again, it runs Android 15. I have, I am with you and that I would, I would, if I were a betting man, I would bet

that that thing will never get one meaningful update in its life. security updates, fine. We'll see. It's currently running, mine is also running a February security update too. There have been updates since February. I have no faith in any of this. Can I show you a couple of pictures I took on this thing?

Just that seemed sort of representative. I'm curious how you feel about it. Because I think a fun thing that we've discovered is that because we've been at this for 20 years, it's pretty easy to have a pretty good camera. Do you know what I mean? Like it's most, smartphones have pretty good cameras at this point. And the Trump phone is kind of no exception

in that front. It has some pretty interesting stuff. But I took a bunch of side by sides with my iPhone 17 that I think were very instructive. Let me just show you a couple of them. So this is, I just stood there and took a picture of a flower from this is the, it's 0.6 on the Trump phone for some reason. And by the way, if you're watching, I would like you to notice the very funniest thing about the camera, which is that it watermarks every single photo you take down here in the bottom. I'm left with the T1 and then the date and time in the bottom right. I'm sure you can turn that off. I never, ever will.

So anyway, that's the telephoto or sorry, that's the wide camera. Yeah. That's the 1x and that's the 2x. And so you look at this and it's pink and green, which is why I want to take this. And this camera just loves the hell out of colors. It is, everything is huge and oversaturated and just like trying to beat you to death with colors. and like put that next to where is this come on Google Photos help me out here the no that's the Trump sorry put that next to the iPhone yeah which takes a completely

different picture at the same thing it's much cleaner and crisper it's much more sort of toned down like I suspect there are people who will look at the T1 and say that's the better photo because it's brighter and more colorful I do not agree with those people But here we are. But again, I think like all of that notwithstanding, this is not a good photo to me, but it is also not like a disaster of a photo. It's not an awful photo. No. And for, it's frankly better than I expected.

Yeah. Then there's some like, here's a T1. This is a picture of a soccer ball, which again had a bunch of colors and textures on it. It just loves colors so much. My main takeaway is it just believes that all colors should be more. colorful 100% at the time. Next to the iPhone, which again, more muted, much cleaner.

This, I, like, to me, there is no competition in which is like an actually better photo. But I had, I had, frankly, lower hopes for the Trump phone. I am just, there is something here to me that is so fascinating about it is not hard to build a pretty good Android phone. Yeah. I'll say the big,

the big point where the camera falls down, As I was talking a little earlier, but in the dark, and as you zoom in and, like, go past that the 2X telephotos kind of default. And the big thing there is that actually, as far as I'm aware, there's no optical image stabilization, even on the main camera. And that's actually something that you will find right down to very cheap phones now, really. You can expect OIS on the main lens, at least. And high-end phones, you might get it on two or three of the cameras. So the moment you zoom, trying to take zoomed-in shots in good lighting, like in daylight, but trying to go up to like 10x, the viewfinder was shaking like crazy,

even as I tried to hold my hand still. So it was impossible to get a good photo, even in good lighting as you were hitting 10x because it was just absolutely incapable of holding a stable shot. And so everything came out very, very blurry. And that's why the night mode really, really struggles as well, because that long exposure, it can't keep the phone sufficiently stable. So all the night shots kind of came out much more blurry, especially on the other lenses, but yeah.

Right. Well, and I think it's really interesting. That's actually a good example of, I think, the difference these days between phones is, like I remember a few years ago, Google came out and basically said smartphone cameras are mostly software now, that we don't actually need to compete on specs

and sensor size in the same way that we used to because it is actually as much about the image pipeline as it is about the raw, you know, materials you are using to collect light. And that's not entirely true, right? Like I think you've tested a bunch of cameras that have interesting hardware ideas about how to take better photos. And in many cases, they seem to work. Like, you're running around with weird lens attachments that do make photos better.

But at the same time, the difference between what you're getting out of something like the T1, which I can absolutely promise you has not been finely tuned by a team of photographers and researchers. The difference is the image pipeline, right? And you have the people at Samsung and the people at Google and the people at Jaomi and Huawei and all these other companies are like working hard to make decisions about what photos should look like. And in many cases, you can agree or disagree with their decisions. But they are doing work to say, here is how we want to work on these photos.

This is just what it looks like when you let a smartphone take a camera and take a picture and it is done. That's it. And I think like optical image stabilization is one of those things that like that stuff is incredibly finely tuned software algorithms as much as it is anything else to correct shake and to correct from your hands and to correct motion. Like that is the difference between what you pay for in a phone like this and what you pay for in a phone that's good. Right. Like the spec sheet is so far from revelatory about whether a phone is any good anymore. I think it's really the point I'm

trying to make. And this is so illustrative of that to me. Like it's a reasonable spec sheet other than some of the processor oldness, you could look at this phone and be like, yeah, it's a pretty good phone. But the actual experience of using it falls apart over and over and over again because that's not actually how you make a good phone anymore. You could kind of take these headline specs,

blow out the GIsland, a couple of them. And basically, I could find you a $200 phone and a $1,500 phone that kind of matched a lot of it. Totally. The screen specs, the battery size. You can even find pretty high, Not 1500, but you can certainly find high-end phones with like equivalent kind of seven-series chips, maybe more recent ones.

But, you know, even that isn't so outlandish. Certainly the storage and RAM, you know, you're going to be able to find high-end phones kind of matching that. So those kind of base just like chipset, RAM, storage, display, megapixel count on the cameras. Like, they just don't tell you anything anymore. Right. And so when the Trump phone was first announced a year ago, you know, we saw that spec sheet, and it was a lot of the reaction for some people was like, oh, these are like pretty good specs. actually, that's kind of weird. And my first reaction was like, yeah, those are like $200

Android phone specs, potentially. Like, I could definitely find you like a POCO phone with basically that spec sheet. It exists. But that's just the way, the weird way the phone market is built, is built now. We've, we've gone over that point where every phone can have 120 hertz OLED, every phone can have a big battery. Every phone can ship, well, used to be that every phone could ship with a decent amount of RAM, but that one's changed. But, you know, otherwise, this stuff is all evened out. And it's, like you say, it's so much in the software site. And that's differentiated now so much in price that is actually, you know, what long-term support are you going to get? If you look at a brand like Xiaomi or Honor or OPA, often one of the biggest things

that changes is you go down their pricing list is how many years they say they're going to give you software updates for. Oh, interesting. Because it costs the money to develop the updates, to test the updates, to ship the updates. They have to get a license from Google for every year they're going to be giving updates out for, which costs a bunch as well. So that's what they skimped on. And that's, this is just actually like the extreme end of that. They skimped on that so hard. They said we don't necessarily want to do any updates because that sounds like a lot of work. Okay. I have one more thing to tell you about this phone.

And I have to, I've waited all this time to admit this. And it's time I admit it now. I kind of like the gold. I'm not proud of this. I think the fact that it says Trump mobile twice on the back of the phone, on the camera bump and on the bottom is absurd. The fact that it is an American flag with the wrong number of stripes is absurd. But there is like a there is like a subtle sort of glitteriness to the gold that I can.

confess I do not completely hate. It catches the light in some kind of nice ways. Like, I kind of get what you mean. Sometimes it looks really, really yellow. And I don't like it at its yellowest. In very bright light, it looks very yellow in a way I do not find pleasant. But when it's gold or it's not the worst. My favorite detail is still the camera placement. They're just like completely uneven spacing between the three lenses. Where the bottom one is just a little bit too far away from the other two. And it's not super clear why. Also on the on the flag stripes, I feel like it's just worth flagging, because this is one of my favorite details about the flag with the wrong number of stripes, is when I chatted to these executives in February, and I first saw this updated

version of the design, this kind of near-final prototype that looked a lot like this, and very different to the first phone we saw. And one of the things you may notice is if you look very closely at the flag on the bottom of that phone, it is not the same as the flag on the bottom of the final phone. It has 13 stripes. They had the right number of stripes. What on earth? They got it right. And they took a stripe off. That's so weird.

They also, in a completely unheard of bit of restraint from the Trump organization, took the giant T1 off the back of the phone. Yeah. That is, that is wild. I completely, I went back in read a bunch of stories because a while ago they were talking about the fact that it was 11 stripes and it was like just another example of the silliness of this entire thing. I completely missed that at one point they actually had it right.

which means somebody went in and removed stripes. They updated the logo, took a stripe. I mean, I think that lends credence to the theory people have, which is that the Trump mobile wordmark is meant to be the 13th stripe. And again, we then just kind of get back to this idea that what we're really dealing with is incompetence, right? Like, they had an idea. They just executed it so badly that it doesn't read right. You don't see that when you look at it.

You're completely right, though. If you look at it as 11 stripes and then the blank space before the logo, is a stripe and then Trump Mobile is a stripe. Yeah. But my God, could they have done that in a way that it's too tall. Like it's too tall. Yeah. It's not, it doesn't have the background.

Like, yeah. They could have done that in a way that would have been like gross and anti-American and horrific, but also like extremely on brand for Trump mobile. Yes. Instead, they just, they just blew the idea. Great job, everybody. Okay. So I think the obvious takeaway here, I don't know if you're going to end up doing a full

review of this or not, but there is like, there's just no world in which a person should buy this. phone, right? I think the existence of this phone is fascinating. It's weird to me. The longer I use it, frankly, the weirder it is to me that they didn't just make a case. Like, because I think, I think the argument for this, right, is actually the exact thing that you said a minute ago, that every time you opened it up, it showed the words Trump mobile to the people behind you at the concert. That's the goal. That's what they're trying to do here. And I'm like, okay, sure, There are people who will put their money behind that idea.

You could make a case at much higher margins that would be appeal to, frankly, many more people because they could just put it on their existing phone. Make it look like this. Just do this as a case for a Samsung S-25 and an iPhone. And all of a sudden, you have neatly solved the exact same problems without all of the work, which apparently there was a lot of because this phone has been delayed a million years, to get this thing actually shipped for people. And they could have actually then gotten what they have been, you know,

kind of mocked a little for not achieving, which is to get Trump himself to hold the thing. Like, he uses an iPhone, right? If they just made an iPhone case, I'm sure one of the Trump sons that are involved with this could have got him to just like slap the case on his phone one day so that there was some shot of President Trump holding the Trump mobile phone case. Also, vastly more likely to successfully make the thing in America.

Exactly. Yeah. You could probably. make a phone case in America. I believe someone out like to make a phone case in America. That feels manageable. Agreed. But I do, I just want you to like think this through next to some of the other phones that you've been testing recently because this, in so many ways, there is something deeply American about this phone, right? Like, you can take that however you want, but there is something very American about the existence of the Trump Mobile T1. But you have also

been using all of the phones that are not available in the U.S. that I think at this moment in time are vastly more interesting. There is so much experimentation going on. There are so many new ideas about form factors and camera hardware and all this stuff. What are you seeing

out in the world right now that is particularly interesting? Let's end in a moment of hope for exciting smartphones, which this very much not is. What have you seen recently that is cool and different and exciting to you?

What have I seen this cool and different and exciting? I mean, I'm excited to see where foldables are about to go because we know we're about to get this wave of, I mean, Huawei's already done it. We've got had a wide foldable from Huawei.

We know now we're pretty sure Samsung's about to do it. They're teasing it. We think Apple's about to do it. So we're going to this new era of foldables going in another odd direction. And we're going to see whether that one sticks any better than the previous direction that kind of hasn't fully, fully stuck in people's minds entirely. I still think cameras are just the area where certainly the flagship and all the big Chinese OEMs are doing very fun stuff with basically cameras and batteries.

We're having silicon carbon batteries, which basically mean you can, get pretty much any modern phone from a Chinese manufacturer and it will last two days. Pretty comfortably. It is now becoming normal for me to have a review phone that I charge every other day, even with the kind of normal to heavy usage. They're pushing that further. We're seeing phones coming out in China with 10,000 million power batteries, 11,000 million power batteries. They're like normal phone sizes. We've always seen this kind of stunt from like energizer releasing a, you know, phone the size of a brick with a 20,000 million power cell. But this is just a normal looking phone that has three times the battery capacity of an iPhone.

And the silicon carbon tech is allowing that. And that's very cool. And then phone on the camera side, we're just seeing all these flagships from people like Vivo went up in Jammi, really pushing further and further into their telephotos. And further into their wide angles again, people are going back to the wide angle, but just as they're finding more spaces to differentiate. But like I was saying, we're kind of, oh, yes, not being on this at all. We're seeing them basically figure out that, you know, the key to making a good camera is

bigger sensor, better stabilizing. and those two things are like the magic hardware tricks that make everything better. And they've pushed that limit kind of on main cameras now. And so now we're just seeing everyone say, well, can we rearrange things? Can we make sizes and shapes of sensors and components different so that we can fit OIS on every single lens on the back of the phone? Can we fit a kind of near one inch type size sensor on every single lens on the back of the phone? And pushing this idea that, you know, you can get that kind of main camera quality on all three of these lenses.

I think we're basically at a point where you could get the right Chinese flagship for like two grand. These are not cheap phones, by any means. You could get one of them and it's ultra-wide will be a better camera than the current iPhone flagship's main camera. Or its telephoto will be. And that's just kind of mad at this point where it's not like main camera and that a quality drop when you go to the others. It's just like, there are three cameras on the back at different focal lengths. Pick the one that you like. They're all really great.

Yeah. Actually, that's very hopeful to me because like I think there's a way to look at something. something like the Trump phone that suggests that all of this hardware has been so unbelievably commoditized. Yeah. You just pick a bunch of things off a list and you get this phone. And it's just that's what phones are now. And every spec sheet is the same.

But it sounds like there actually is a hardware revolution kind of in process. It's just that in the U.S. we don't really see it right now. No, totally. Like you said earlier, you know, Google made that decision years ago that certainly for cameras, hardware wasn't the thing. They can do it all the software. I think what the big Chinese players have been improving over the last few years is hardware still matters. You just have to be willing to put up with a really ugly phone to get there.

You will have a huge camera module on the back. It will be like a giant circle. It will take up a third to a half of the back of the phone and jut out almost as thick as the phone itself is again and things like that. So there is an obvious tradeoff there. And I think that's why we're seeing, you know, the apples and the Googles kind of say, we're fine not pushing that far into hardware. But I love that somewhere out there is. And they're just saying, what if we just really did make this thing as good a camera as we could possibly get and really push up against the limits of camera hardware, squeezing it onto the back of a phone.

I have a solution to your ugly phone problem. Big gold case, Donald Trump's face all on the whole thing. The bigger the phone, the bigger the face. Yeah. Everybody wins. You know what I mean? Just get a kind of fluffy orange bit that goes on top of the camera module. The case actually, it just has the hair, the swoop of the hair.

above the phone. I love this. All right, Tom, we should get out of here. God help us, we might be able to be done talking about the Trump phone. At least until the T2 comes out and it's like a foldable with a keyboard and blows our minds all over again. But I'm not holding my breath on that one. Oh, it's the T1 Ultra. They've already teased it. No, Lord, have they really? Threatened might be a better word, I know.

But, yeah, they have mentioned the T1 Ultra. I hope it's a bluff. I really do. Yeah, I think one year of this has been enough for all of us. But it's good to see you, buddy. Thank you to everybody who's been in the chat and hanging out with us. It's good to see all of you. Thank you to Travis, our producer and everybody in our team for getting this done. Dom, good to see you, buddy.

That's it. That's the Vergecast. Rock and roll. If you win a $3,000 a month payday for life, what would you feel free to do? Maybe take a long weekend, every weekend, or try a bunch of new hobbies. Would you feel free to upgrade and listen ad free? Don't worry. We get it.

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