Every week at The Verge, we’re tracking what’s happening with Trump Mobile’s promised and yet undelivered Android phone. Why? Because we cover phones. We also cover vaporware, which the T1 Phone 8002 (gold version) very well may be. The smartphone has now been delayed for months. Trump Mobile no longer claims that it will be made in USA, but “designed with American values in mind” instead. Well, we’re still waiting. Stay tuned as we collect all the little red flags along the way.
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It’s been well established that the Trump Phone doesn’t exist. But that isn’t the only phone Trump Mobile sells. It also offers a range of refurbished Apple and Samsung handsets that you can buy right now. You really shouldn’t though.
I was relieved reading Allison’s coverage over the last two weeks to discover that not everything about Trump Mobile is a scam. It may have taken her a couple weeks to actually get a SIM card, but once it arrived it did work just fine — it’s T-Mobile, after all. It made me realize that you could, if you wanted, get Trump Mobile coverage on a Trump Mobile-sold phone right now, so long as you don’t mind that the hardware won’t have “American hands behind every device.”
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Where’s the Trump Phone? We’re going to keep talking about it every week. We’ve reached out, as usual, to ask about the Trump Phone’s whereabouts. As usual, we’re still waiting for a response. In the meantime, we’re testing the service on Trump Mobile’s MVNO. Here’s how that went.
As I sat down at the bookstore cafe with a cortado and an oat bar, I panicked just a little bit when I turned on my phone’s hotspot. What if my hotspot network gave me away? Would it say ALLISON’S TRUMP PHONE? Would someone smart sitting next to me, sipping matcha, catch sight of it? What would they think of me?
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For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been asking — repeatedly — where the promised Trump phone is, whether it exists, and what happened to all the money people have already paid for deposits. And I’m going to keep doing that every week for the foreseeable future.
Not everyone thinks I should. I’ve been told that covering Trump Mobile is “playing into his hands,” that “this obvious con [doesn’t need] any more publicity,” and that “we don’t need to read about it literally every week.” And those are just the nice messages — you don’t want to see some of the other ones.
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Last week I asked where the Trump phone was. The answer? Nowhere. There’s no update, no response, no sign of it. And since it’s still not here, I am — again — asking the same question. And I’m afraid I’m going to keep being here, week in, week out, until I have a T1 Phone in my hands. This is what I do now.
Nothing’s changed since last week. The website sits there, unchanged. There’s still no release date beyond “this year,” I’ve still had no reply from my emails to Trump Mobile, and the company’s social channels are still sitting silent.
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Almost exactly a month ago, I wrote an article for theverge.com pointing out that the T1 Phone 8002 (gold version) — a.k.a. the Trump phone — had missed its promised release date. Now here I am again, because the phone still hasn’t come out.
In case you’ve forgotten, the T1 is a very gold mid-range Android phone that was announced in June alongside a $47 Trump Mobile wireless plan. The Trump Organization promised an August launch in its press release, but said September on its website. An unnamed spokesperson later told USA Today that the launch had been delayed to October.
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I’ve got bad news if you’ve been impatiently awaiting the release of the Trump Mobile T1: it looks like the gold-tinted, bargain basement smartphone with “American values” is running late. It was initially meant to launch in September, but with only a few hours of the month left, that’s looking increasingly unlikely.
The T1 was announced in June, along with the launch of Trump Mobile’s $47.45 monthly service plan. The release date was always a little unclear — the Trump Organization’s press release promised the phone would arrive in August, while the Trump Mobile website claimed September — but either way, it hasn’t happened. That means any buyers who actually stumped up the $100 deposit for the hardware still have nothing to show for it.
