You don't need a celebrity-endorsed smartphone or mobile plan to thrive in this world.
I've had an exhausting and demoralizing couple of days, where every technical issue that could go wrong did. For that reason, I hope you'll forgive me for generating the title image for the newsletter today. It was all that I could muster at the last minute. I blame it all on the bad vibes that started us off this week.
By bad vibes, I'm of course referencing Trump's spillover into the smartphone world. On Monday, Trump Mobile, run by the sons, announced the T1, a $500 phone that only a true patriot would be willing to wield. (I say that with the utmost sarcasm.) The T1 phone (lol) advertises as being entirely manufactured in the U.S. and, despite its decidedly mid-range specifications, boasts it will have abilities that surpass those of the current top iPhone.
The only specifications we know about it so far are that it has a 6.8-inch AMOLED display with a 120Hz refresh rate, a fingerprint sensor, and face unlock. It also features a 50-MP primary camera, along with a 5,000mAh battery, 12GB of RAM, and 256GB of storage. The spec lineup isn't exactly groundbreaking, and you'll see much of the same stats in a similarly priced mid-range device from the likes of Motorola and OnePlus.
No one has confirmed the OEM contracted to produce the phone, although The Verge has compiled a list of probable overseas players that may have signed on for the job. For longtime Android faithful, you'll notice familiar names mentioned, such as Doogee and Blu, which are known for offering extremely budget-friendly pricing on their low-end devices.
Wall Street Journal also managed to trump the claim that the T1 phone would be manufactured entirely in the United States by August. Although the article takes a soft turn, examining the T1 spec by spec on how it could outperform the iPhone 16 Pro (again, lol), it then reminds us of the other promise Trump Mobile made that it can't deliver:
"There's absolutely no way you could make the screen, get that memory, camera, battery, everything" in the U.S., said Tinglong Dai, a professor of operations management and business analytics at Johns Hopkins University's Carey Business School.
Dai estimated it would take "at least five years" for the U.S. to establish the infrastructure necessary to make "Made in USA" smartphones a real possibility.
This isn't the first time a celebrated egomaniac has leveraged fame to push through mobile hardware and/or a phone plan. Ryan Reynolds is the purveyor of Mint Mobile, an MVNO that sells data in bulk on T-Mobile's cell towers at a subsidized price. Reynolds has had a ton of success being the friendly face of a carrier, which has likely emboldened others to try it, too.
Jason Bateman and his well-known pals, Will Arnett and Sean Hayes, have also recently announced they're entering the mobile industry with SmartLess, another MVNO. They intend to take on the big carriers, such as AT&T and Verizon, by offering access to T-Mobile's extensive network of towers at a lower, fixed price for people who don't use much data.
The reason these rich people are setting foot in the mobile industry isn't because they care about whether or not we're getting the best price on a monopolized industry. It's that they're seeking a way to diversify their investments. Sure, a little bit of it is about branding, especially in the case of Trump's T1 phone, which seems to exist as an alternative to the not-made-in-the-U.S. Tim Apple iPhone. But at the end of the day, it's a marketing angle to help funnel that money into something, anything. And as long as the world relies on smartphones and wireless access to the internet to function, the celebrities will find a way to grift.
Juan Bagnell joins Huyen, Ron, and Mishaal to chat Android 16 and Wear OS.
Tune in on Tuesday, June 24, at 5:00 p.m. PT/8:00 p.m. ET to join the live recording on YouTube and Twitch!
