We’ve had unboxings, hands-ons, and teardowns, but Bloomberg is the first publication to give the T1 Phone a detailed review. It might be kinder than you expect — Verge alumnus Chris Welch admits the specs aren’t bad — but still reaches the obvious conclusion: “It’s easy to find a better phone than this.”
Pixel foldables get the new feature first, which is being added to Android 17 alongside native controller remapping, but only rolls out “in the coming months.” We’ve seen control options like this in other foldables before, but it’s welcome to see Google bake it into the OS.
The X Fold 6 doesn’t launch until later this month, but we already know it’ll be compatible with the X300 Ultra’s 200mm telephoto lens. It’ll have a meaty camera of its own too, with a 200-megapixel, 1/1.4-inch main camera and a 50-megapixel, 1/1.95-inch telephoto.
It’s still unclear what the T1 Phone even is, or if it will ever ship.
8
Verge Score
But the bigger battery is the only one that matters.
Quinn Nelson is one of the lucky (?) few to actually get their hands on the T1. The Trump Mobile emails kept going to spam, the site is broken, and a customer service agent asked for his password over the phone. Spoiler: Things didn’t get better once he turned it on.
If you’re in the US, you can now find the Nothing Phone 4A Pro, Phone 3, Headphone A, and Ear 3 in person at over 500 Best Buy stores across the country, giving you a chance to toy around with the devices before you buy one.
Dummy lenses are my least favorite design trend in cheap Android phones, so I have mixed feelings about the new Tecno Pova 8 5G. It has what looks like a third camera lens, but is really a Nothing-esque dot-matrix display for alerts and icons. That’s an improvement, I guess?
Luxury / trashy phone brand Vertu is back with its first book-style foldable, the Alphafold, an “AI command center” for busy rich people. It sounds like it’s found its audience.
Akarain8:
Finally a phone that fits my lifestyle at the intersection of Texan ranch owner, middle-eastern oil baron, and YouTube AI ‘content creator’.
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According to leaker and journalist Sonny Dickson, that is, who shared photos of iPhone 18 dummy units — though these look like Pro models, due this fall, with the regular 18 likely launching next spring. Dickson got last year’s iPhone 17 colors almost dead-on, meaning this brand new cherry color is probably accurate.
The Alphafold costs $6,880 (and that’s if you want to slum it with a calfskin finish), with more expensive options including alligator leather, gold, and diamonds. That gets you a year-old Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 chip, a five-megapixel telephoto (yes, five, not 50), and an AI agent called Hermes.
6
Verge Score
It’s a gorgeous phone with excellent battery life, but sometimes standing out isn’t so great.
YouTuber Coffeezilla first reported the leak of customer details, now apparently fixed. Trump Mobile CEO Pat O’Brien has now confirmed to The Verge there was a breach, which he blames on “a third-party platform provider.”
“The impacted information appears to be limited to certain customer details, including names, email addresses, mailing addresses, order identifiers and mobile phone numbers.
Out of an abundance of caution, our third-party platform provider has implemented additional safeguards and enhanced monitoring measures while the matter continues to be investigated.”
Update: Added comment from Trump Mobile’s CEO.
Yes, The Verge has been talking about the Trump phone every week, but we’re not surprised that we’re off the Mar-a-Lago VIP list. There’s still a lot more to find out when we finally get our hands on the thing — but for now, here’s basically what NBC has to report from its experience:
NBC News tested its basic features, such as calling, texting, browsing the internet and taking photos, all of which functioned normally with an activated SIM card.
Cool. It is indeed a phone. More to come.
The T1 Phone was supposed to start shipping last week. But our review units haven’t budged, and I’ve so far failed to find anyone online claiming their phone has shipped either. Maybe they’ve had to delay the launch to fix the flag.
The cheaper, performance-focused follow-ups to the Xiaomi 17 series launches on May 28th. We don’t know exactly where yet, but expect an international launch. The T phones usually drop a couple camera specs in exchange for bigger batteries and cheaper prices than the main flagship line.
[X (formerly Twitter)]
Back in 2000, people were legitimately wondering if anyone would want to use the internet on their phone. At a time when i-mode phones connected to primitive mobile-specific pages were cutting-edge, and the concept of a smartphone wasn’t really in the public consciousness, the skepticism is understandable.
It was reported last week that Intel and Apple struck a deal for unknown chips. Now supply chain analyst Ming-Chi Kuo reports Intel is manufacturing “low-end/legacy” chips for iPhones, iPads, and Macs, the majority for the phones. The scale is small though, with TSMC set to retain 90 percent of Apple’s chip supply.
Honor says it’ll launch in Q3, meaning July-September, though we’re still expecting it to be a China exclusive. The news was announced at the Cannes Film Festival, where Honor celebrated its partnership with professional cinema camera manufacturer Arri. The Robot Phone will be the first to include “core elements of Arri image science.”
That’s the pitch for the 17 Max, a new phone Xiaomi is teasing on Weibo. It looks exactly like the regular Xiaomi 17, but has a 6.9-inch display — the same size as the 17 Pro Max and Ultra. That’s all we know so far, but it launches in China this month.
In case you missed it, yesterday’s Android Show stream included a brief list of every phone with current and confirmed plans for AirDrop support in Quick Share. Google also told The Verge that Xiaomi is planning support this year, though we don’t yet know to which phones.
Charli xcx just invested in Nothing and was announced as the company’s first global brand ambassador. For their first promotion together the startup claims it had the singer wear the Nothing Headphone A for five days straight to test their 135-hour battery life.
