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. This time, surprisingly, we received a response — and an interview.
The Trump phone is real — maybe, sort of, soon? — and I’ve seen it. Not in the flesh, but during an hourlong video call with two Trump Mobile executives who showed me a phone, and told me more about why it was delayed, when it might actually reach buyers, and why its spec sheet has changed again and again.
I spoke to Don Hendrickson — yes, the one who had seemingly ghosted me last time — and Eric Thomas, two of the three executives that run Trump Mobile. The T1 Phone that Thomas shows me over Google Meet isn’t a final production model, but apparently it’s close. The T1 logo — seen since the first renders of the phone — will apparently be dropped before launch, though the American flag at the bottom will remain, as will the signature gold finish.
It’s clear from a glance that this isn’t the same phone the company teased eight months ago. The iPhone-esque camera triangle has been replaced by three lenses laid out vertically in a black, oval island with “Trump Mobile” written alongside. Look closer and you’ll see those lenses are unevenly spaced.
The phone is different in a few other ways from both the version that was announced in June 2025 and the altered spec sheet that appeared on the Trump Mobile website a couple of weeks later. It looks larger, with the “waterfall” display (curved screens are back, baby) appearing closer to the 6.78-inch screen originally promised than the 6.25-inch model that appeared a little later.
It will be powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 7 series chipset, usually used in upper-midrange devices, and include a 5,000mAh battery, 512GB of storage, and support for up to 1TB microSD cards. I don’t know the full camera spec just yet, but I was told that both the selfie camera and the main rear camera are using 50-megapixel sensors, and a glimpse of the camera UI suggests the inclusion of an ultrawide lens and perhaps a telephoto, neither of which had been listed before.
“This actual phone does spec with the top-of-the-line phones in the market this year,” Thomas says, later claiming it will be comparable to “any phone that’s over $1,000.” I’m not entirely sure that’s true, given you can find comparable specs, even the 50-megapixel selfie camera, in the OnePlus Nord 5, which ships with 512GB storage in the UK for £499 — around $679. Much will depend on camera performance and whether it includes flagship touches like waterproofing or wireless charging, which I don’t yet know. But it is true that some specs — the selfie camera resolution, the storage capacity, the ultrawide lens — are improved from the T1 Phone we saw (or didn’t) at launch.
To reflect that alleged improvement in quality, a price hike is coming. Hendrickson is quick to emphasize that everyone who placed a $100 deposit already (he wouldn’t tell me how many had done so) will still pay $499 total, but they’re now calling that an “introductory price.” Later buyers will pay more, though “less than $1,000” is all the pair would confirm, with the final price apparently still to be decided.
So why all the changes? To hear Thomas and Hendrickson put it, there was so much interest in the T1 Phone that it only felt right to make the phone better by jumping forward a little in their long-term plans. “Let’s skip our first initial entry-level phone that we were going to kind of introduce and be quick to the market,” Thomas says of the company’s thinking following the early media attention. “Let’s take our time and do what we were planning to be the next step.”
The pair suggest the decision to re-spec the phone is behind some, though not all, of its delays — the T1 Phone is now six months late to launch. Still, they say it’s coming soon. The phone has apparently cleared FCC certification (itself supposedly slowed by the government shutdown) and is now awaiting certification with T-Mobile, expected to complete sometime in mid-March. After that, Thomas says the company will be ready to ship phones to early buyers, though he’s hesitant to commit to an exact date. For a phone that was first promised for August or September, then by the end of 2025, and still only says “later this year” on the official website, I would take any launch timeline with a fistful of salt.
Still, it sounds like we’ll see more soon regardless. The two executives promise that a Trump Mobile “relaunch” is coming, and that within “the next couple of weeks” the website will be updated with images of the final phone, along with its spec sheet. Our long wait is nearly over.
Of course, there’s one thing the T1 Phone won’t be: made in the USA. Instead, the handsets go through “final assembly” in Miami, though Thomas is careful not to say too much about what that means. It’s more than “slapping a cover on the phone,” and apparently involves putting together the final 10 or so pieces. The pair won’t say where the bulk of the phone is assembled prior to that, only that it’s done in a “favored nation,” which essentially seems to be a way of saying “not China.”
To call a product “made in the USA” you have to meet certain standards, laid down and enforced by the FTC. The Trump Mobile site instead currently promises that there are “American hands behind every device,” and Thomas says that the wording was chosen because they “want to be upfront and not misleading at all to people.” He admits that there “might have been something put on the website” in error at launch (in this case, a huge homepage banner that said the T1 is “MADE IN THE USA” and a press release that said it’s “proudly designed and built in the United States”), but that since then “we’ve kind of stayed away from that.”
Full assembly in the US is still what the pair call a “goal,” though, one they’re apparently working on for future phones like the T1 Ultra — yes, that’s apparently real too, though they wouldn’t tell me much more about it.
I guess we’ll have to keep waiting, but until then: The Trump phone is real (ish), I’ve seen it (sort of), and it’s finally going to launch next month (maybe).
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