Wait, the Trump phone might actually exist

Last week I issued a reminder that Trump Mobile’s T1 Phone does not exist, and may never exist, despite the fact that the company showed me a phone in an effort to convince me otherwise. Today instead I bring cause for optimism for the Trump phone believers: it appears to have been certified by the FCC.

FCC listings for a smartphone with the trade name “T1” show that it was tested late last year, and granted certification by the FCC in January. That lines up with what two Trump Mobile executives told me last month when I saw the phone, when they claimed it had already received certification.

The documents in the listing are redacted, which is typical for public FCC listings, and so they include no images or photographs of the phone. Nor do they confirm many interesting specs, beyond support for Bluetooth 5.3 and Wi-Fi 6E. They don’t mention Trump, Trump Mobile, or even the carrier’s parent company Liberty Mobile, which is why it’s taken me until now to find them. Instead, the phone was submitted for testing by another company entirely: Smart Gadgets Global, LLC. And that’s why I’m so confident this is the Trump phone.

Smart Gadgets Global’s website promises “Top Quality Electronics created for ‘YOUR’ customer!” and claims to deliver “Product development, material sourcing, production all the way through final packaging of your product or private labeling one of ours.” The site is as outdated and error-filled as every other Trump Mobile-affiliated website I’ve found so far, with an empty “Shop” section, a “Terms and Conditions” page that consists only of instructions on how to write terms and conditions, and a privacy policy that’s listed as “coming soon.” There’s a chatbot too, but it was unable to tell me anything at all about the T1 Phone, where Smart Gadgets Global manufactures its products, or what the company even really does.

Smart Gadgets Global may be a new name to me, but its CEO isn’t: Eric Thomas, one of the two Trump Mobile executives I spoke to last month. I needed to be sure that this was the same Eric Thomas, but that proved easy enough: Smart Gadgets Global’s FCC documents list an address in Ogden, Utah — the exact same address listed as a mailbox for construction and excavation businesses owned by the Eric Thomas I met. Then there’s the only identifiable product on the Smart Gadgets Global website among a sea of generic renders: a health tracker bearing the brand Vmed Mobile. That appears to be manufactured by Smart Gadgets Ltd., a company based in Shenzhen, China, that claims to be a wholly owned subsidiary of Vmedical, Inc. — where Thomas is the CEO.

I reached out to Thomas and Trump Mobile, neither of whom replied. I tried Thomas on the Smart Gadgets Global email address listed in the FCC documents too, but haven’t had a response there either, nor have I heard back from a request I made using Smart Gadgets Global’s contact form. I tried phoning the number listed as Thomas’s on the FCC applications as well, but after I told the automated call screening software who I was, whoever was on the other side of that number decided not to take my call. I also reached out to Eurofins, the testing lab listed in some of the documentation, but haven’t heard back. For good measure, I tried T-Mobile again, to see if it’s finished its own certification of the T1 Phone, but the company declined to comment.

FCC certification doesn’t guarantee that the Trump phone will be released imminently, or at all. But it is more evidence that Trump Mobile is at least attempting to manufacture and launch some sort of phone. The jury’s still out on whether it will actually succeed though.

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