T-Mobile and Perplexity announce new ‘AI phone’ priced at under $1K

It was inevitable that this year at MWC in Barcelona, at least one carrier would announce a major effort at building a smartphone with a top AI company. And here it is: T-Mobile, the mobile telco owned by Deutsche Telekom (DT), said that it is building an “AI Phone,” a low-cost handset created in close collaboration with Perplexity, along with Picsart and others, plus a new AI assistant app it’s calling “Magenta AI.” T-Mobile said it will unveil the device in the second half of this year, and it will start selling it in 2026 for a price tag of less than $1,000. “We are becoming an AI company,” Claudia Nemat, a DT board member who oversees tech and innovation at the telecom, said during a press conference Monday. It’s not building foundational large language models, she was quick to add, “but we do the AI agents.” The news is the latest development in a familiar story from the world of telecoms. For years, carriers — both mobile and fixed — have pined for ways to compete better with ... Read full article.