{"id":793399,"date":"2026-07-10T19:12:15","date_gmt":"2026-07-10T19:12:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/793399\/"},"modified":"2026-07-10T19:12:15","modified_gmt":"2026-07-10T19:12:15","slug":"i-spent-a-week-using-the-trump-phone-it-sucks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/793399\/","title":{"rendered":"I spent a week using the Trump phone \u2014 it sucks"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Trump phone was never a serious phone. Not when it was announced last June<\/a>, in dodgy renders and with an incoherent spec sheet. Nor when Trump Mobile admitted \u2014 just two weeks later<\/a> \u2014 that it wouldn\u2019t be made in the US. Not even when the company revealed the final phone, first to me over a video call<\/a> in February and then to the world in April through a short commercial<\/a> with the slick sheen of AI.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s now on sale for $499, past the days of its tenuous, ever-shifting release dates. A few buyers even have the phone, The Verge among them, though more still seem not to.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s clear now that the T1 is a real phone, but that doesn\u2019t mean it\u2019s a serious one. Still, for the next thousand words or so, I will try to take it seriously.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

$499<\/p>\n

The GoodIt actually exists3.5mm headphone jackMicroSD card slotIt basically runs stock Android<\/p>\n

A serious phone wouldn\u2019t look like this <\/p>\n

The T1 Phone is a curved slab of cheap gold plastic, the smartphone equivalent of a pair of knockoff wraparound Oakleys. The gold finish \u2014 more yellow in certain light, though it certainly does shine and shimmer \u2014 is tacky in every sense, with a sticky friction that makes it feel distinctly unpleasant to the touch. My phone arrived with a tiny scratch in the top-right corner.<\/p>\n

The phone is fairly thin, and light, but its excessively curved waterfall display feels immediately dated. It also loses one of the chief advantages of that design \u2014 better in-hand feel \u2014 thanks to the oddly angular frame, which juts into my palm as I hold it.<\/p>\n

Almost every detail speaks to bad design. There\u2019s the American flag logo, missing a stripe. The fact that \u201cTrump Mobile\u201d appears on the back twice, in two different orientations and two different fonts. Or the camera module, where the three lenses are spaced at irregular intervals.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Count the stripes.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I don\u2019t think anything about this phone annoys me as much as the lens spacing.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

God, I miss notification LEDs.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

A headphone jack is less uncommon, but still pretty rare.<\/p>\n

There are things to like. The 3.5mm headphone jack will have its fans, as will the microSD card slot inside the phone, or the fact that the phone ships with a case, charger, and braided USB cable. These are things that a certain type of Android fan has lamented the absence of for years.<\/p>\n

I, for one, am more excited to be reviewing a phone with a notification light again, a true treat that I thought we\u2019d lost forever. It\u2019s a glimpse of a better world, one I didn\u2019t expect from Trump Mobile of all companies. But like the curved screen, even these welcome touches betray that this is a dated, old-fashioned phone, one based on an old HTC design<\/a> that already felt like a throwback two years ago.<\/p>\n

A serious phone would work outside the US <\/p>\n

I live in the UK, meaning I may well have the only Trump phone outside of North America. It cannot maintain any signal stronger than 2G, meaning I can use it for texts and calls but not for data. As best as I can tell from digging through the T1\u2019s FCC certification documents<\/a>, the phone simply doesn\u2019t support the network bands commonly used in Europe.<\/p>\n

The T1 Phone isn\u2019t sold in Europe, and that misshapen flag makes its target market clear. But even Americans get to go on vacation every once in a while. From my experience, it seems unlikely that the T1 would work anywhere in Europe and perhaps not anywhere in the world outside North America.<\/p>\n

A serious phone would use more than the minimum hardware<\/p>\n

At first glance, the T1\u2019s spec sheet might seem impressive enough: a 120Hz OLED screen, a 5,000mAh battery, a triple rear camera with 50-megapixel sensors.<\/p>\n

But the truth is you could find similar specs on almost any $200 Android phone and superior ones on phones sold at this price. Hardware like this is cheap and commodified, something that\u2019s only beginning to change thanks to the ongoing memory crisis<\/a>. Here, amusingly, the T1 is generously specced: 512GB of storage and 12GB of RAM come as standard. Those, along with the inclusion of wireless charging, are the only things that really stand out on this spec sheet.<\/p>\n

\"Real<\/a><\/p>\n

Real gold, guaranteed.<\/p>\n

Despite all that RAM, and Qualcomm\u2019s modestly capable Snapdragon 7 Gen 3 chipset, the T1 is often sluggish. It sometimes stutters when switching apps or triggering animations, making even basic apps like Duolingo frustrating to use. This hardware isn\u2019t flagship, but it should certainly be more capable than this. I can only assume Trump Mobile didn\u2019t develop the sort of software and firmware performance optimizations that other manufacturers do, handicapping the phone from the start.<\/p>\n

1\/16I took the T1 Phone out with me around London to test the camera. Photo: Dominic Preston \/ The Verge<\/p>\n

I suspect the camera\u2019s limitations are for similar reasons. The three rear lenses and single selfie camera take basic, functional photos, at least in good light \u2014 with the exception of the 8-megapixel ultrawide, which is uniformly poor.<\/p>\n

Other phone manufacturers spend millions optimizing their image pipelines, and none of that work is evident here. Daylight photos are vivid and oversaturated, nighttime shots are noisy, and the telephoto shows no signs of electronic stabilization at all, making it feel shaky and unstable. Incredibly, by default every shot is overlaid with a strangely small T1 watermark \u2014 as if anyone should want to take credit for these photos.<\/p>\n

1\/12While David Pierce took the excuse to test it in DC. Photo: David Pierce \/ The Verge<\/p>\n

A serious phone would have made more effort in its software<\/p>\n

As the Trump phone lurched haltingly toward its launch, the going assumption from many was that it would be a bloated mess, loaded with spyware, crypto apps, and MAGA-themed experiences, putting the president\u2019s leering face front and center.<\/p>\n

The truth is rather more mundane. It runs Android \u2014 the nearly two-year-old Android 15, to be precise \u2014 with almost no modifications at all. This is, in fact, about as close to what the nerds call \u201cstock\u201d Android as you\u2019re ever likely to get these days.<\/p>\n

The only preinstalled apps that are out of the ordinary are Truth Social, Trump\u2019s own social media network, and Doctegrity, a telehealth platform that\u2019s included with Trump Mobile\u2019s $47.45 cell service. Beyond that you get a single Trump Mobile wallpaper and those photo watermarks, and that really is that.<\/p>\n

In a sense, that\u2019s a good thing \u2014 I\u2019m hardly lamenting the lack of bloatware. But there\u2019s also no sign that Trump Mobile has the ability or the intent to optimize its phone\u2019s software or deliver any features beyond the minimum.<\/p>\n

\"Truth<\/a><\/p>\n

Truth Social comes preinstalled, though you can get rid of it.<\/p>\n

More worryingly, Trump Mobile hasn\u2019t announced how long it will support the phone with software updates. When I spoke to executives from the company in February, they seemed confused by my question about how many Android version updates the phone would receive, though they did insist that customers won\u2019t \u201cbe locked into what\u2019s there today.\u201d For now, that means a 2024 version of Android with a February 2026 security patch; I wouldn\u2019t hold my breath for either to be updated any time soon.<\/p>\n

A serious company would put more effort in<\/p>\n

In a strange way, the T1 Phone isn\u2019t all that terrible, but only because it proves how hard it actually is to make a truly terrible phone these days. It\u2019s easy enough to throw together the baseline hardware, stick Android on top, and call it a day. For better or worse, that\u2019s more or less exactly what Trump Mobile has done. Between the simple software and the dated hardware features, the T1 is an oddly compelling phone for some old-school Android fans, but Trump Mobile got there entirely by mistake.<\/p>\n

\"Premium.\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Premium.<\/p>\n

This isn\u2019t a serious phone. It\u2019s a marketing stunt that got out of hand, a way to grab attention and juice the subscriber count for an overpriced cell service with the president\u2019s name on it.<\/p>\n

Trump Mobile doesn\u2019t care about this phone. And after the year of reporting on it<\/a> that\u2019s led to this review, I\u2019m thrilled to finally say: Neither should you.<\/p>\n

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See All Tech<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Trump phone was never a serious phone. Not when it was announced last June, in dodgy renders…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":793400,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[49,48,195,190,53820,10523,2100,714,209,64,61],"class_list":["post-793399","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mobile","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-gadgets","tag-mobile","tag-phone-reviews","tag-phones","tag-policy","tag-politics","tag-reviews","tag-tech","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/793399","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=793399"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/793399\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/793400"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=793399"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=793399"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=793399"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}