We finally have a Trump Phone | The Vergecast Livestream

21:21David Pierce:So actually on the specs of these, we were getting some questions about the specs of the phone um which is an unusually complicated question at this moment in time uh you you again the answers to this question have changed a bunch over the last 12 months um no pressure if you don't but do you happen to have the current specs in front of you can you like 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 uh we think it's powered by the snapdragon 7 gen 3 uh that one we actually don't like know in any official channels. All Trump Mobile has ever said is a Snapdragon 7 series.

21:58But, you know, you can figure out that it's the 7 Gen 3s. We're pretty sure it's that.

22:01David Pierce: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, that's gold right now. It's pretty solid. We're going to see a lot more Android phones drop down from those storage or RAM numbers this year.

22:38So this kind of is weirdly going to stand out a little for that. Triple camera on the back, 50 megapixel main camera, 50 megapixel two times telephoto. I think that 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 HTC U24 Pro because there'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 milliamp hour battery and 30 watt charging, I think.

23:10David Pierce: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 that's a pretty good chip from two years ago uh and you can just do you can do vastly better for less money in in the year of our lord 2026 um and again it runs android 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 uh security updates fine we'll see it's currently running mine is also running a february security update too.

23:51David Pierce: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? Most smartphones have pretty good cameras at this point. And the Trump phone is kind of no exception 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.

24:24David Pierce: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 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 the the telephoto or sorry that's the wide camera yeah that's the one x and that's the 2x and so you you like you look at this and it's it's pink and green which is why i wanted 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 uh where is this come on google photos help me out here uh the no that's the trump sorry put that next to the iphone yeah which takes a completely different picture of the same thing uh 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 um i do not agree with those people but here we are but again i think like all of that notwithstanding this 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 and for for it's frankly better than i expected yeah uh then there's some like here's a t1 this is a picture of a soccer ball uh which again had a bunch of colors and textures on it it it just loves colors so much that's my main takeaway is it just believes that all colors should be more colorful 100 of the time uh 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 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.

26:37Yeah. I'll say 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 telephoto is 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 just shaking like crazy, even as I tried to hold my hand still.

27:17So 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 of the all the night shots kind of came out much more blurry, especially on the on the other lenses. But yeah, right.

27:37David Pierce: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 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.

28:12David Pierce: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 Xiaomi 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.

28:52David Pierce: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. The spec sheet is so far from revelatory about whether a phone is any good anymore. I think is really the point I'm trying to make.

29:25David Pierce: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 diesel on 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. Like the screen specs, the battery size, you can even find pretty high, not 1 ,500, but you can certainly find high-end phones with like equivalent kind of 7 series chips, maybe more recent ones.

30:04But, 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. And so when the Trom phone was first announced a year ago, we saw that spec sheet and it was, a lot of the reaction for some people was like, oh, these are pretty good specs. Actually, that's kind of weird. And my first reaction was like, yeah, those are like$200 Android phone specs, potentially.

30:34I could definitely find you a POCO phone with basically that spec sheet. It exists. But that's just the weird way the phone market is built now. We've gone over that point where every phone can have 120Hz OLED. Every phone can have a big battery. every phone can ship. Well, it 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 said, it's so much in the software side. And that's the differentiator now so much in price. That is actually, you know, what long-term support are you going to get?

31:03If you look at a brand like Xiaomi or Honor or Oppo, 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 them 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 skimp on. And 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.

31:33David Pierce:Okay, I have one more thing to tell you about this phone. 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 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.

32:07In very bright light, it looks very yellow in a way I do not find pleasant. But when it's gold, 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 flag stripes, I feel like it's just worth flagging. So 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. I saw a near final prototype that looked a lot like this.

32:40And 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.

33:02David Pierce: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. uh that is that is wild i completely i went back and read a bunch of stories because a while ago they were talking about the fact that it was 11 stripes and it was like a just a 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 word mark is meant to be the 13th stripe um and 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 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 like it's too tall yeah it's not it doesn't have the background.

34:06David Pierce: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. Instead, 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's just no world in which a person should buy this phone. 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. Because I think the argument for this 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.

34:49David Pierce: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 s25 and an iphone and all of a sudden you 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 uh 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.

35:32Like 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. Just saying. Exactly. Yeah. You could probably make a phone case in America. I believe

35:52David Pierce:someone out like a phone case. 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.

36:27David Pierce: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 that's 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 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 into this new era of foldables going in another odd direction.

36:59And 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. Um, 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 getting 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 kind of normal to heavy usage.

37:33That's huge. 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 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 and Xiaomi really pushing further and further into their telephotos and further into their wide angles.

38:09Again, people are going back to the wide angle, but just they're finding more spaces to differentiate. But like I was saying, we're kind of OIS 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 stabilization 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 oas 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 And pushing this idea that you can get that kind of main camera quality on all three of these lenses.

38:48I think we're basically at the 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.

39:01David Pierce:Wow. Or it's telephoto will be. Yeah. 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 like the Trump phone that suggests that all of this hardware has been so unbelievably commoditized that sort of you just you just like pick a bunch of things off a list and you get this phone and it's just that's what phones are now.

39:29David Pierce: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 US, we don't really see it right now. No, totally. Like you said earlier, Google made that decision years ago that certainly for cameras, hardware wasn't the thing. They can do it all as software. I think what the big Chinese players have been proving 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.

40:06There is a bit an obvious trade off there. And I think that's why we're seeing, you know, the 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 of camera hardware, squeezing it onto the back of a phone.

40:24David Pierce:I have a solution to your ugly phone problem. Big gold case. Donald Trump's face 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.

40:58Oh, it's the T1 Ultra. They've already teased it. No, Lord, have they really? Threatened might be a better word. but yeah, they have mentioned the T1 Ultra. I hope it's a bluff. I really do.

41:08David Pierce: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 on our team for getting this done. Dom, good to see you, buddy. That's it. That's the Vergecast. Rock and roll.

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