Hello and welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of two-year-old mobile processors. I'm your friend David Pierce. Dom Preston is here. Hi, Dom.
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 8002 gold version by my side the whole time through this glorious weekend. It's been a real treat.
I earnestly wonder this. I have a lot of thoughts about this phone. You and I both have them. We both have 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?'
Oh, it was very strange. When the, you know, I kind of had the FedEx shipping notification. And so then when my buzzer for 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 confused like, 'What is here?' So, 'The gold phone, it's arrived.' It was like Christmas morning, you know, this thing I've been 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, shiny, very very cheap-feeling, slightly off-gold phone that kind of manages to really underwhelm 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 funny. They paid some wallpaper designer, and by some wallpaper designer, I mean someone with five minutes on their hands to make 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'd 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 DocTegrity, which is a telehealth app, which is a big part of the Trump Mobile idea too. That with the Trump Mobile plan, you also get DocTegrity. I will say it is not clear whether you get DocTegrity for free through Trump Mobile. I have heard some people say that. 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'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. That's one of the odd things about this phone, that 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 stuff installed. There are fewer extra pre-installed apps than you'll get on any Samsung, Xiaomi, you know, Motorola, whatever. From one angle, you can look at this and say, 'Wow, this is like the Android nerds' dream device. You know, T-Mobile did it. They made the perfect Android phone.'
Yeah, let's talk about the other angle, Dom.
I mean, the big obvious angle is that there are some bits of this hardware that are okay. I mean, I just said somebody even just, you know, you look at some of the specs on 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, we'll get to this later probably, but you know, I chatted to two T-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 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 have come totally 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 unserious group of people. The thing that they seem to actually care about and be trying to do is T-Mobile, right? That is real service. It is once again 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 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 saying not only are we going to have an overly needlessly expensive MVNO 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 Geekbench stuff and it's hilarious to look at, right? It benchmarks about half what you'll get from the Pixel 10, another phone that came out that's actually technically an older phone. It benchmarks at almost a third of what you would get from something like the S25. 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 curved screen that all the Samsung phones had like 10 years ago. I just 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'll 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, you know, that headphone jack, that SD card slot. 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 just 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. The phone plan is the business. It has always been the Trump Mobile business. They thought they'd get some attention by being like, 'Oh, we're going to do a phone. Wow, okay, you got a 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 that attention.
Which is at least in part your fault. We should say very clearly. You did.
It's dumb. 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 us 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'd take them three months.
Yeah. So, again, 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 HTC U24 Pro.
Is that still the read? You think that's right?
I'm pretty confident it 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 phone. The body, the build is identical. Anyone who watched the iFixit teardown will know that they already pulled the two phones apart side by side and made a Frankenstein phone from parts from each that still turned on because they were so fundamentally compatible. There are some innards that have changed, like the battery is different. It's a slightly bigger battery. It charges slightly more slowly. The battery is also interestingly made in the Philippines, or at least it claims to be made in the Philippines. And my understanding is that T-Mobile is sort of pushing this idea a bit that they've 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 parts 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 HTC U24 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 a gold braided cable. No, 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 flicked through it? It's incredible.
It has, 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 of 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 it. 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. Yeah. 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 would say that. My, I don't know about 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 with the case on, it would have helped. 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. And is 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 out that I described it as A4 paper.
I mean to interrupt. Most of this is about how to sign up for Trump Mobile.
Yes, it's all, it's called the T1 Quick Start Guide. 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 US 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 US 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 and what its measurements are. But, that's the investigative journalism we can do.
I can confirm it is the same size. It appears to be 8 and a half by 11. Yep, it is an 8 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 in. 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.
But here we are. 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, I actually say the first thing before even the camera that 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 it's the first.
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, so I can't use it as my phone.
It yells at 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 round as a second device because it has no internet for me. It's, you know, just like a gold brick in my pocket. But I've been carrying it around. I was at a concert on Friday night. Robyn was playing at a big arena show, so I took it for that. 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. It's a hard one.
I threw it into the deep end, but I thought, you know, I'll just see what it kind of does here. Actually, the main camera did okay. It was just the zoom, the two times telephoto and the ultra-wide were kind of unusable shots as soon as it was in the dark. That also is worth saying, it's been Pride weekend in London. So, I was at the electro-pop show on Friday night before Pride weekend, getting out my Trump phone, and like 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 whereas I was flashing that like Trump Mobile wallpaper up to everyone behind me in the crowd. And after that, so I like unlocking the phone down by my waist to try and hide the big glowing Trump Mobile logo.
You learn how to sort of put your hand over the bottom of it to hide the... You're like, 'No, it's a different color phone. Don't worry about it.'
So, I took it there. I took it to the tennis. I was at Wimbledon yesterday. I was lucky enough 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, you know, 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. The Vivo was just kind of wiping the floor with this phone. As soon as you went beyond two times, it was just unusable photos.
Yeah.
So, actually on the specs of these, we were 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?
What this phone actually ostensibly is now in your hands?
I have a broad sense of what this actual phone should be.
We think it's powered by the Snapdragon 7 Gen 3. That one we actually don't know in any official channels. All T-Mobile has ever said is a Snapdragon 7 series. But, you know, you can figure out that it's a 7 Gen 3. We're pretty sure it's.
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 Hz 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 GB of storage and 12 GB of RAM. Which actually like they might be losing money on this thing just.
That might be worth the $500 literally by itself at this point. 12 gigs of RAM is like that's gold right now.
It's pretty solid. We're going to see a lot more Android phones drop down from those storage and RAM numbers this year. So, this kind of is where they're going to stand out a little for that. Triple camera on the back, 50 MP main camera, 50 MP two times telephoto. I think the ultra-wide is 8 MP. It also weirdly has a 50 MP selfie camera. That was one of the ways we originally tied this back to the HTC U24 Pro because there's a very small list of Android phones that have 50 MP selfie cameras. So, that really helped to kind of pin it down to that. 5,000 mAh battery and 30 W 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.
