Time for Tech Tuesday. Mike Dubuski, ABC News Technology reporter Mike is always thanks for hanging out. Quick question, well, I even actually not even quick. The Trump family phone plan. So let me ask you. I don't know if you bought a one of the Trump ties bibles. The stakes were very strong, and now we've got the phone plan, tell us about it. Why would other than for political reasons, why would I buy a phone plan?
That's a great question, and I will try to measure up to the astronaut here. I know it's tough act to follow, but yes. On Monday here in New York City, the Trump Organization, which is not run by President Donald Trump but rather run by his sons Eric and Don Junior, announced that they're getting into the telecom space with Trump Mobile.
This is what's known as an MVNO or a virtual mobile excuse me, a virtual mobile network operator, which kind of piggybacks off the larger service providers in the United States AT and T, Verizon T Mobile, so it should offer the same coverage as those types of service providers. It is forty seven forty five a month, which are significant numbers for the Trump family given that that is
sort of his place in the presidential line. But that is a little bit more expensive than what we would expect from some of the competitors in this smaller network space, things like mint Mobile or things like Cricket wireless. This is a little bit pricier than that. But the Trump family is saying that they're offering some bonuses, things like roadside assistance and telehealth services. We don't know really how that's going to work in practice, but that is what
they are saying. Justifies that additional cost. And in addition, despite the fact that they say that this will work with pretty much any modern smartphone, they're also offering their own smartphone. But this thing also raises a little bit more questions than it, you know, maybe at first Blush answers. It is called the one. Its full name is actually T one Phone eight thousand and two gold version. It is gold. It has a big T on the back
and an American flag. They say it has a six point eight inch screen with a one hundred and twenty hertz for fresh rate, of fifty megapixel camera and a five thousand milliampaer long life battery. So it is a pretty standard mid range Android device. But there are some question marks on the website if you dive a little deeper into the specs. For example, the processor and RAM section claims that the storage of this phone is twelve
gigabytes of RAM. Ram and storage are two different things, so we don't really know what the storage is here. We also don't know what the processor is up until this morning when they change it. They also claim to have a five thousand milliamp hoer camera of millionp howers are used to describe battery size, so that is also a sort of question mark there. The photo they have appears to be a computer rendering. It looks sort of iPhone esque, but there's no flash next to the camera array,
so that's a question mark as well. These are all things that maybe give people pause before they put down the one hundred dollars deposit.
Yeah, and by the way, one hundred dollars deposit towards.
How much five hundred dollars is.
Okay, all right, but obviously not the gold phone.
So it's interesting, right they call it the gold version, implying a non gold version, a standard version, but that there's no real evidence of that on the website at this point. And in addition to that, that five hundred dollars should also give us a little pause as well, because the Trump family claims that they're going to build this phone here. Yes, at some point.
That is the question I asked, How does someone build a phone? Considering the intricacies and the manufacturing, et cetera in the United States, how do you physically do that?
It's really difficult. In short, for one all the reasons that you laid out right, there's no real infrastructure to do this. The Trump family would need to spin up a factory to do this and agree with suppliers to build the materials needed for this phone in the United States as well. And in addition to that, there are no major smartphone manufacturers building phones in the US, so there's no real knowledge base to hire people to do this,
at least here in the US either. So it's going to be a big task if that is exactly what they're trying to do. Now, we've seen similar phones like this crop up aimed at like one specific side of the political aisle, on both sides of the aisle, where essentially they've bought cheap phones from China and then imported them into the United States with different branding on them. There's a phone called the Freedom Phone a few years
ago that basically did that. But again, a major point of the Trump administration, which again is separate from the Trump Organization, so they say, you know, is aimed at bringing manufacturing back to the United States. So that's what they say they're going to do. But even still, for all the reasons that we've outlined, there's some reason to be skeptical of that.
All right, I wish we had more time. I know you have to be a lot of here, you got a lot more reported to do. Thank you. We'll talk again because there's a ton of questions I have about that and the the meta story. Take care, Mike, Thank you.
Take it.