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The Trump phone just got a $250 price hike

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Why This Matters

Trump Mobile's T1 Phone quietly jumped from a $499 "promotional" launch price to $749 with no hardware changes, a 50% increase made without any announcement. It's a reminder of how thin the substance is behind celebrity- and politics-branded hardware, especially with the device still on a two-year-old Android 15 build and reports that some buyers never received their phones.

Key Takeaways
Worth a Look

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is a news editor with over a decade’s experience in journalism. He previously worked at Android Police and Tech Advisor.

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Bad news if you didn’t lock in a Trump phone at launch: It now costs $749, a $250 increase on its price at launch. The T1 Phone itself hasn’t changed.

Trump Mobile didn’t announce the price increase, instead quietly changing its website overnight. This wasn’t a total surprise though, especially given the phone ships with an unexpectedly generous 512GB of storage and 12GB of RAM. When I spoke to two Trump Mobile executives earlier this year, they called the $499 launch pricing “introductory,” and a few months later, the website itself was changed to reflect that, calling it a “promotional price.” That wording is now gone.

Related I spent a year trying to figure out if the Trump phone is a scam

To my surprise, my Trump phone has received some support since it launched. There’s been exactly one software update, moving it from Android’s February 2026 security patch to the May 2026 version. It’s still running Android 15 though, which is now two years old.

While the Trump phone officially started shipping in May, almost a year after it was announced, it remains unclear just how many customers have received their phones. A report from the BBC last month found that at least some buyers still say their phones never arrived.