I spent a week using Trump’s phone, it’s bad

Trump’s phone was not a serious phone at all. Not when he was Announced last Junewith dodgy offers and an incoherent spec sheet. Nor when he admitted Trump Mobile – After only two weeks -It will not be manufactured in the United States. Not even when the company revealed the final phone first me via video call In February and then to the world in April through A Short commercial With brilliant AI shine.

It’s now on sale for $499, days after its fragile and ever-changing release dates. Even a few buyers own the phone, Edge Among them, although more still seem not.

It’s now clear that the T1 is a real phone, but that doesn’t mean it’s a serious phone. However, for the next thousand words or so, I will try to take it seriously.

A serious phone won’t look like this

The T1 is a curved slab of cheap gold plastic, the equivalent of a pair of knock-off Oakleys. The gold finish—more yellow in certain light, though it certainly sparkles and shimmers—is downright tacky, with a sticky friction that makes it feel unpleasant to the touch. My phone arrived with a small scratch on the top right corner.

The phone is fairly thin and light, but the overly curved waterfall display instantly looks dated. It also loses one of the main advantages of this design – better hand feel – thanks to the oddly angular frame, which protrudes into my palm as I hold it.

Almost every detail speaks of bad design. There is an American flag logo, without the stripe. In fact, “Trump Mobile” appears on the back twice, in two different directions and in two different fonts. Or the camera module, where the three lenses are placed at irregular intervals.

there We are Things you love. The 3.5mm headphone jack will have its fans, as will the microSD card slot inside the phone, or the fact that the phone comes 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.

Personally, I’m more excited to review a phone with a notification light again, a real joy that I thought we’d lost forever. It’s a glimpse into a better world, one I didn’t expect from Trump Mobile of all companies. But like the curved screen, even these welcoming touches reveal that this is an old-fashioned phone. Based on the old HTC design It actually felt like a throwback to a couple of years ago.

The serious phone will work outside the US

I live in the UK, which means I may have the only Trump phone outside of North America. It can’t sustain any signal stronger than 2G, which means I can use it for texts and calls but not data. Best I can tell from digging FCC T1 certification documentsThe phone simply does not support the network bands commonly used in Europe.

The T1 is not sold in Europe, and this warped flag makes the target market clear. But even Americans go on vacation every now and then. From my experience, it seems unlikely that the T1 will work anywhere in Europe and probably not anywhere in the world outside of North America.

A serious phone will use more than minimal hardware

At first glance, the T1’s spec sheet might seem impressive enough: a 120Hz OLED display, a 5,000mAh battery, and a triple rear camera with 50MP sensors.

But the truth is, you can find similar specs on almost any $200 Android phone and superior specs on phones sold at that price. Devices like this are cheap and commoditized, something that’s only just starting to change thanks to… Persistent memory crisis. Surprisingly, the T1 is generously specified: 512GB of storage and 12GB of RAM come standard. These, along with the inclusion of wireless charging, are the only things that really stand out on this spec sheet.

Despite all the RAM and Qualcomm’s modestly capable Snapdragon 7 Gen 3 chipset, the T1 is often sluggish. It sometimes stutters when switching between apps or playing animations, which makes using basic apps like Duolingo frustrating. This device isn’t groundbreaking, but it certainly has to be more capable than that. I can only assume that Trump Mobile hasn’t developed the kind of software and firmware performance improvements that other manufacturers do, holding the phone back from the start.

I suspect the camera limitations are for similar reasons. The three rear lenses and a single selfie camera take basic, functional photos, at least in good light – except for the 8MP ultra-wide camera, which is uniformly poor.

Other phone makers spend millions improving their photo fonts, and none of that work is evident here. Daylight photos are vivid and saturated, night shots are noisy, and the close-up shows no signs of electronic stabilization at all, making them feel shaky and unstable. Incredibly, by default, every shot is covered by a strangely small T1 watermark – as if anyone should He wants To get credit for these photos.

A serious phone could have put more effort into its software

As Trump’s phone lurched hesitantly toward its launch, the prevailing assumption among many was that it would be a hot mess, laden with spyware, cryptocurrency apps, and MAGA-themed experiments, putting the president’s leering face front and center.

The truth is more mundane. It runs Android — the nearly two-year-old Android 15, to be exact — with almost no tweaks at all. This is actually as close to what nerds call “stock” Android as you’re likely to get these days.

The only pre-installed apps that are out of the ordinary are Truth Social, Trump’s social media network, and Doctegrity, a telehealth platform built into Trump Mobile’s $47.45 cell phone service. On top of that, you get one Trump Mobile wallpaper and those image watermarks, and that’s really all there is to it.

To some extent, that’s a good thing – I hardly lament the lack of bloatware. But there’s also no indication that Trump Mobile has the ability or intention to improve its phone’s software or offer any features beyond the bare minimum.

What’s even more worrying is that Trump Mobile has not announced how long it will support the phone with software updates. When I spoke to executives from the company in February, they seemed puzzled by my question about how many Android version updates the phone would receive, though they insisted that customers wouldn’t “be limited by what’s out there today.” Right now, that means a 2024 version of Android with the February 2026 security patch; I wouldn’t hold my breath for either of them to be updated anytime soon.

A serious company will do more

In a weird way, the T1 isn’t that terrible, but only because it proves how difficult it is to make a truly terrible phone these days. It’s easy to bundle the basic hardware together, put Android on top, and call it a day. For better or worse, that’s exactly what Trump Mobile did. Between the simple software and dated hardware features, the T1 is a strangely attractive phone to some old-school Android fans, but Trump Mobile got there completely by mistake.

This is not a serious phone. It’s a marketing ploy that has spiraled out of control, a way to attract attention and increase the number of subscribers to an expensive cell service bearing the president’s name.

Trump Mobile doesn’t care about this phone. And after Year reported Which is what led to this review, and I’m finally happy to say: And neither should you.