Future of Smartphone Innovation

Hello and welcome to The Vergecast, a flagship podcast of two year old mobile processors I'm your friend David Perce, Dom Preston is here, Hi Dom Hey, how are you? Dom, it happened. It really happened. If I listen, I just want everyone to understand what I assume must have been a truly remarkable forty eight hours in your life Wimbbleon is happening. Youngland played one of like the all time great World Cup games and most importantly Y your life as a reporter is complete because you got a trump phone. This. I had the T one phone, eight thousand two brackets Gld version closeed brackets By my side the whole time through this glorious weekend. It's been a real treat I earnestly wonder this, I I have a lot of thoughts about this phone. You and I both have them. We've both 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 the literally the last twelve months Uh What was it like to honestly get this thing in your hands?as it Was it a weird experience to be like, oh, this thing is actually real 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 can I, you know, let the guy into the building and then like turn to my partner and said, it's here And she looked at me with almost confused like what is here Gold phone. It's arrived. It wass like Christmas morning, you know, this thing I've been waiting for so long finally turned up Uh And then yeah, I mean, just very surreal getting this thing Unboxing it getting my, you know, first first grab of this strange, slightly tacky, slightly sticky, sheiny, very, very cheap feeling, slightly off gold phone that kind of manages to really underwhelm immediately in a whole lot of ways at once Um But what a two threat, she'd be underwhelmed 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 time I mean, like the running joke of this has been, right? If this whole thing is a grrift, there's going to be a massive amount of stuff installed there's going to be Trump junk everywhere. It's going to be just absolutely riddled with that you don't want Guinely shocking asent, that is not the case. There is in fact one wallpaper installed, which is very fine They 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 The only one you need David. I don't know what else fun. There is just this one wallpaper. There are Tw pre installed apps that would not have come on just like a bang standard Android phone. One is trruth social, of course, which is s just terrific and hilarious. The other one is Doc Tegrity, which is a telehealth app which is a big part of the mobile idea too that with the Trump mobile plan, you also get doct integrity. I will say it is not clear whether You get doock integrity for free through Trump mobile I have heard some people say that I have I confess that I got a ways down the sign upp flow to the point where it wanted me to pay twenty nine dollars and then I would have had to go back and activate anything and I don't. 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 obious been picking apart every scrap of information I can get on this and we've seen a couple of other journalists get this. So I kind of knew some of what was coming here U But it is so close to a stock Android experience. It's one of the od things about this phone that in a weird way, this is the phone a lot of Android ners have been asking for for a long time. It's a phone with a headphone jack. it's a phone with a microSD card slot It's a phone with a notification LED It runs like almost pure stock Android with very little like I say very little stuff installed. There are fewer extra pre installed apps than you'll get on any Samsung, Xiaomi, you know, Motorola, whatever. Um From one angle, you can look at this and say, wow, this is like the Android Nerbs' dream device. the you know, Trump mobile did it. They made the perfect Android phone Let's talk with the other angle, sorry. What's the other angle I mean, the big obvious angle is that like There are some bits of this hardware they' are okay. I mean I just said some, but even just you know, you look at some of the specs and it's fine, it's not great, but it's fine Big thing with his 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 has a February security patch and tells me it's up to date It's on Android fifteen rather than sixteen. When I, you know because get to this later probably you know, I chated to two Trump 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 what do you mean?ike, yeah, it's gotone Android. It's got Android fifteen And the idea that they had to do any more than that seemed seemed to have come as a Totally b of the blue to that 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 unerious phone made by a fundamentally unserious group of people time. the thing that they seem to actually care about and be trying to do is Trump mobile, right? That is real service. it is once again, a grift on top of the T mobile network. That's all fine.. It comes with with a sort of bizarre looking SIM card. It's forty seven dollars forty five cents a month. likeike 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 U this phone M as well not exist. And I think the more I use this phone, the more I don't understand why it exists. becausecause 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. idea of saying Not only are we going to have a 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 specset, right? And it's it's a two year old chip benchmarks, I just went through all the geek bench stuff and it's like hilarious to look at, right? It It benchmarks about half what you'll get from the Pixel ten, another phone that came out. Act technically an older phone. It benchmarks at like almost a third of what you would get from something like the S twenty five. 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 like curved screen that all the Samsung phones had like ten years ago H. I just I 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 how 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 would 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 aredated about it. Like you said, the waterfall design like curve screen, you know, that headphone jack, the SD cardsore. These are the only standout features and it's just because everyone else stopped doing them because this is presumably assembled mostly out of all parts sitting on shelves that the ODM just had no further use for and able to let us 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 the whole thing, you know, to kind of what you were just talking about is This is just a marketing stunt gone wrong. They the phone plan is the business. It has always been the Trump mobile business. They thought they'd get some attention by being like, I we'm going to do a phone. Wow, get your golden Trump phone And they just seem totally shocked. by how much attention and interest it developed. I think particularly attention. I think they hate the attention, whichich is at least in part your fault. We should say very clearly. you did this down. I 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 planan. They were like, But the plan, but you know, the cell service.'s the that's the great thing we're doing. And I just kept being like, but the phone. tellell 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 lotad more people on the sell plan And I think they just underestimated how much us and other sites were kind of latch onto this and be like Wait, they made a trrump fund, 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. evenven if you are doing this lowest possible effort version of making a phone, it still took them a year when they clearly thought it would take them three months So okay, 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 HTCU twenty four pro. Is that still the read? You think that's right? I'm pretty confident that is. I never personally reviewed the U twenty four P 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 U The body, the build is identical. Anyone who watched looked did the IFixit tear down 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 inners that have ched. like the battery is different. It's a slightly bigger battery The charg is slightly more slowly. The battery is also interestingly made in the Philippes or atast it claims to be made in the Philippines and and My understanding is that if you Trump Mobileil are sort of pushing this idea a bit that they tried to move away from more Chinese manufacturing I think there might be some other little components where they've kind of just shifted supplier to a non Chinese part 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 so yeah, this is an H twenty HTCU twenty four proro in all but name and battery capacity And u to your point about where these things are made We also have the question, is there literally any indication that any part of the inards 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 inerts. So allow me to just briefly share A This is the box It's it's black. It says Trump mobile Um It has The correct number of stars and the wrong number of stripes as is this has been litigated to death. I did count each individual star. There are fifty of them, but there are eleven 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 U The SIM card comes in it, it really would like you to get the Trump mobile plan Um The other thing that comes in it, I would say is the single best thing that comes with the Trump phone And it's it's a gold braided USB C cable Ah Do I have any confidence that this is a good USBC cable? I don't. but it doesn't go great. No, it doesn't. It doesn't. You could like could I could pull this thing apart on camera, I suspect U, 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 u 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 here that I really got to 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 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 so you get the manual. you get this, you get the little power brick. whichich is also clearly just a part lifted out of a factory somewhere. and that is the entirety of it So to the question, Dom, is there Is there any indication that anything in here has been touched since it entered the United States? Nothing definitive. I will say that. My I don't know m your phone. My phone is not gonna be perceptible on the camera. My phone came with like the tiniest little scratch in one corner Oh say, I'm sorry, I missed a piece C clear case. Oh the clear case. So if they shifted with the case on it would have help 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 still we do here States that says assembled in the USA, proudly assembled in the USA, I'm sorry. I left off the pride time Technically outside the box, but inside the shipping package, you get the Qick Start guide, which is separate from the user manual is very clearly a cheap like inkjet printer piece of paper. You can see all the banding and everything Yeah So that bit, I kind of believe was probably printed in the US. That seems impusible to me. What I actually want to do is try and measure the paper because someone pointed it I described a. I don't mean to interrupt. Most of this is about how to sign up for Trump mobile. Yes. it's called the Ton quicks. It's not 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 Itsair Yeah, what I want to do is measure the paper Be I described it as A four 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 theres 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 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 do this now and we can do I can I can confirm it is the same size. It appears to be eight and a half by eleven It is an eight and a half by eleven piece of pap It is normal letter paper in the United States Do without what you will, everybody Breaking. That is different than A four. A four is eight point three by eleven point six nine inches. So It is a U.S. paper They probably printed. Also, this comes with a date of purchase dated june fifteenth, twenty twenty six, which is not remotely when we bought this phone No But here we are Okay, what else about this phone you have you found interesting? Have you been messing with a camera at all I have, I've u taken the phone with me all weekend. I mean I would you 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 two G signal So I can use it to make phone calls, but I cannot use it to access the internet Uh So I'm guessing you st If you sign up for Trump mobile or even try to use the T one in the UK, it should just play the Star Spangled banner every time you try to do anything. It' let me set it up in UK English, though. Android. They haven't like locked all the other languages out of Android at least Wow But yeah, so I use like 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 r around as a second device because it has no internet for me. It's, just like a gold brick in my pocket But I've been carrying it around. I I was at a concert on Friday night. Robin was playing at a big arena show, so I took it for that. and took some very disappointing sort of arena lighting, challenging photos, and it really failed that test very hard. For any phone, to be fair. It hard It's a hard one. I threw it in the deep end, but thought, you know, I'll just see what it kind of does here. E the main camera did okay. It was just the zoom. The two Tes telephoto and the ultra wide were kind of unusable shots as soon as it was in the dock. That also, it's worth saying it's been Pride weekend in London U so I was at the electro pop show on Friday night before Pride weekend gettingetting out my Trump phone And like first time I turned out to take a photo, I just kind of did it like I would any other phone. And then where as I was flashing that like Trump mobile wallpaper up to everyone behind me in the crowd And after that started unlocking the phone down by my waist to try and hide the glowing Trump mobile logo. You do a real you learn how to sort of put your hand over the bottom of it to hide that you're like, no,'t give it us a great ph. Don't worry about it. U So I took it there. I took it to the tennis. I was at Wimbledam 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 daylight Again, the main camera was good I had along with me the Vivo X three hundred 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 tri to do anything further than kind of the default main camera distance that Viva was just kind of wiping the floor with this phone as soon as you went beyond two times, it was just got unusable photos Yeah. So actually on the specs of these, we werere getting some questions about the specs of the phone which is an unusually complicated question at this mom in time. You, again, the answers to this question have changed a bunch over the last twelve years. No pressure if you don't, but 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. Okay, hit me. We think it's powered by the Snapdragon seven G three That one, we actually don't like know in any official channels. All Trump Mobile has ever said is a Snapdragon seven series. but you know, you can figure out this is a seven Genthreze. We' pretty sure. It shows up that way in the like when you run a benchmark, it gots the CCPU it identifies, which I think is how everybody's figuring it out. Yeah Um It has a six point seven eight inch one hundred and twenty Htz 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 twenty twenty six is it has five hundred twelve gigabytes of storage and twelve gigabytes of round Actually like they might be losing money on this thing. That may be worth five hundred dollars literally by itself at this point. twelve gigs of RM is like it's gold right now. It's pretty solid. We're gonna to see a lot more Android phones drop down from those storage RM numbers thises year. So this' kind of it's where they're gonna to stand out a little for that tririple camera on the back, fifty megapixel main camera, fifty megapixel, two times telephoto. I think that ultrawide is eight megapixel. It also really has a fifty megapixel selfie camera. That was one of the ways we originally tied this back to the HDC U twenty four proro because it's a very small list of Android phones that have fifty megapixel selfie cameras So that really helped to kind of pin it down to that Um five thousand millionp battery and thirty watt charging, I think So like it 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, right?ike that's a that's prettyty good chip from two years ago. And you can just do you can do vastly better. for less money in the years of our Lord twenty twenty six U And again, it runs inroot Android fifteen. 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. security updates Fine, we'll see it's currently running mine is also running a February security update too. There have been an updates since February. Yeah 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? Yeah 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 twenty years Pretty easy to have a pretty good camera You you know what I mean? Like it's's 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 seventeen. that I think were very instructive. Let me just show you a couple of them Um, so This is I just stood there and took a picture of a flower from this is it's zero point six on the Trump phone for some reason. Okay. 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 T one 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 telephoto or sorry, that's the wide camera. Y, That's the one X and that's the two X. And so you like you look at this and it's pink and green, which is why I want 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 U Where is this? Come on, Google phhotos. Help me out here Uh, the noope that's the Trump. sorry P put that next to the iPhone which takes a completely different picture of the same thing U it's much cleaner and crisper, it's much more sort of toned down. L I suspect there are people who will look at T one and say that's the better photo because it's brighter and more colorful. I do not agree with those people. But here we are. But again, I think like all of that, notwithstanding this is not a good photo to me, but it is also not like disaster of a photo. It's not, an awful photo. No. And for it's frankly better than I expected. Yeah Then there's some like But here's the T one. This is a picture of a soccer ball, which again had a bunch of colors and textures on it just loves colors so much. My main takeaway is it just believes that all colors should be more colorful. one hundred percent of the time. Uh, next to the iPhone, which again, more muted, much cleaner. this like To me, there is no competition in which is like an actually better photo I had I had frankly, lower hopes for the Trump phone just there is something here to me that is so fascinating about It is not hard to build a pretty good Android phone I'll say the big the big point where the camera falls down as I was s talking a little earer but in the dark And as you zoom in and like go past that the two X 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 expectIS on the mainlandes 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 ten X The viewfinder was shaking like crazy, even as I tried to hold my hands still. So it was impossible to get a good photo, even in good lighting as you were hitting ten X 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 can't keep the phone sufficiently stable. So the all the night shots kind of came out much more blurry, especially on the other lenses. but yeah. 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 Uh that we don't actually need to compete on exs 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 draw. You know, materials you were 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. and in many cases, they seem to work. 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 T one, which I can absolutely promise you has not been Fineally tuned by a team of photographers and researchers difference is the image pipeline, right? And you have the people at Samsung and the people at Google and the people at Ziaom Mi 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. They are they are doing work to say, here is how we want to work on these photos 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 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. 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 my she is so far from revelatory about whether a phone is any good anymore. I think it's really the point I'm trying to make. And this is so Illustrative of that to me, like it's, it's a reasonable speresheet other than some of the, you know, 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 Yeah falls apart over and over and over again because that's not actually how you make a good phone. You could kind of take these headline specs blow out the ge on a couple of them. And basically I could find you a two hundred dollars phone and a fif five hundred dollars phone that kind of matched a lot of it, like totally. The screen specs, the battery size, you can even find pretty high not fifteen hundred. you can certainly find high end phones with like equivalent kind of seven series chips, maybe more recent ones but you know U Even that isn't so outlandish C certainly the storage and RAM, you know, you're going to be able to find high infones 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. Right. And so When the Trump phone was first announced a year ago, you know, we saw that spec sheet and it was A lot of the reaction with some people is like, oh, these are like pretty good specs, actually, that's kind of weird. And my first reaction was like, Yeah, those are like two hundred dollar hundred Android phone specs potentially.ike I could definitely find you like a pocko phone with basically that specsheet. It exists Yeah But that's just the way the weird way the farone market is built is built now.'ve've 've gone over that point where every phone can have a one hundred and twenty hz OLD, every phone can have a big battery. E phone can ship well U used to be that everyone could shit with a decent amount ram, but that one's changed. you know, otherwise this stuff has all evened out and it's, I you say it's So much in the software sideite. And that's to differentiated now so much in price is actually what long term support youre going to get? If you look at a brand like Xiaomi or Oor or Opera Often one of the biggest things that changes as you go down their pricing list is how many years they say they're going to give you software updates for. Because it costs the 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's this is just actually like the extreme end of that. They skimped on that so hard they said we necessarily want to do any updates because that sounds like a lot of work Okay, I have one more thing to tell you about this phone. And have been I've waited all this time to admit this and it's time I admit it now. I kind of like the gold, Tom 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 there is like a subtle sort of glitteriness to the gold that I confess I do not completely hate catches the light in some kind of nice ways. Like I kind of get what you mean. I sometometimes it looks really, really yellow and I don't like it at its lowest In very bright light, it looks very yellow in a way I do not find pleasant. When it's golder, it's not the worst. My favorite detail is still the camera placement, there just like completely uneven spacing between the three lenses. the bottom line is just a little bit too far away from the other two. and it's not super clear Wh Also on the flag stripes, I feel like it's just worth flagging because 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, this kind of sort of near final prototype that looked a lot like this. and very different to the first phone we saw O 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 font. And It tast stpes. They had the right number of stripes.. They got it right and they took a stripe off That's so weird. they also in a completely unheard of bit of restraint from the Trumpone organization took the giant T one. I know off theiss the phone. Yeah U 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 eleven stripes and it was like a just to another example of the silliness of this entire thing completely missed at one point, they actually had it right, which means somebody went in and removed stripes. They updated the logo, took a stripe out. I mean, I think that lends credence to the theory people have, which is that the Trump mobile word markark is meant to be The thirteenth stripe U 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 readrite. You don't see. You're completely right though. If you look at it, it is eleven stripes and then the blank space before the logo is a stripe and then Trump moobile is a stripe But my have done that in a way L it's too tall. Yeah. It's not, it doesn't have the background. Like, they could have done that in a way that would have been like gross and anti American and horrific But also like extremely on brands for Trump Mobile Instead, they just 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 is like there's just no world in which a person should buy this phone, right? I think the existence of this phone is fascinating weird to me The longer I use it, frankly, the weirder it is to me that didn't just make a case. Yeah because I think I think the argument for this, right 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. 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. makeake it look like this Just do this as a case for a Samsung S twenty five and an iPhone and all of a sudden, 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 to get this thing actually shipped for people And they could have actually then gotten what they have been you know, kind of mocks a little for not achieving, which is to get himself to hold the thing Like he uses an iPhone, right? If they just made an iPhone case, that I'm sure. O 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 exactly. Yeah. You could probably make a phone case in America. I believe someone out would to make a phone case in America. That feels manageable 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 T one But you have also been using all of the phones that are not available in the US that I think at this moment in time are vastly more interesting. There is so much experimentation going on There's so many new ideas about form factors and camera hardware and all this stuff Hm. 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 like is cool and different and exciting to you Um what have I seen this's cool and different and exciting U 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, Huawe' already done it We've got had a wiide foldable from Huawei. We know now Pre pretty sure Samsungs about to do it. They're teasing it. think App's about to do it. So we're going into this new era of foldables going in another oddirection. And we're going to see whether that one sticks any better than the previous direction that kind of hasn't fully fully stuck people's minds entirely. I still think cameras are just the area where certainly the flagship and all the big Chinese REMs are doing very fun stuff with basically the 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 Um ye pretty comfortably It is now becoming normal for me to have a review phone that I charge every other day, even with the kind of normal to heavy usage. That pushing that further. We're seeing phones coming out in China with ten thousand million power batteries, eleven thousand million power batteries. They're like normal phone sizes. you know, we've always seen this kind of stunt from like Energizer releasing us, you know, phone the size of a brick with a twenty thousand million power cell. But this is just a normal looking phone that has three times the battery capacity of an iPhone and the Silicon C tech is allowing that's very cool Um, and then phone on the camera side, we're just seeing all these flagships from people like Vivo went up and Jami reallyally pushing further and further into the telephot zos and further into their wide angles. again, people are going back to the wide angle, but just so finding more spaces to differentiate But likeike I was saying we' kind of OIS not being on this at all We're seeing them basically figure out that 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 push 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, sensors and components different so that we can fit OIS 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 phone and pushing this idea that, you know you can get that kind of main camera quality on all three of these lenses., I think we're basically at the point where you could get the right Chinese flagship For like two grand, these are not cheap phones bandros. You can get one of them and its ultra wide will be a better camera than the current iPhone flagships main camera.ow. or it's telephoto will be. 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' just like there are three cameras on the back at different foc lengths P pick the one that you like,. they're all really great That 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 All of this hardware has been so unbelievably commoditized. 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. and every spreadsheet is the same, but it sounds like there actually is a hardware revolution kind of in process. It's just that in the U.S., we don't really see it right now N totally, likeike you said earlier, you know, Google made that decision years ago that certainly for cameras H hardware wasn't the thing they can do it all software. I think what the big Chinese players have been improving 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 circule that will take up a third to a half of the back of the phone and juck out almost as thick as the phone itself is again and things like that and So There is a bit an obvious trade offff there. and I think that's why we're seeing know the Apples and the Googles kind of say we're fine not pushing that far into hope. But I love that the someway out there is and they're just say 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 camera hardware squeezing it ono the back of a phone I have a solution to your ugly phone Gumm 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 swooep of the hair above the phone. I love this. All right, Tom, we should get out of here U God help us, we might be able to be done talking about the Tump phone At least until the T two comes out and it's like a foldable with a keyboard and blows our minds all over again. Im not hold my breath on now it's the T one Ultra. they've already teased it. Have they really Threatened might be a better word, I think. but yeah, they have mentioned the two one Ultra. I hope it's a bluff. I really do. Yeah, I think one year of this has been enough for all of us. But it's good to see you budy. 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 in our team for getting this done Dom, good to see, buddy. That's it. That's the Virge cast