USA Today reports:
Trump Mobile phones are being shipped this week, the company exclusively confirmed to USA TODAY in an email May 11....
The company's first smartphone — the T1 Phone — was originally scheduled for release in August. However, the golden gadget's release was later delayed to October before being pushed back again to this week. Now, Trump Mobile CEO Pat O'Brien told USA TODAY, pre-ordered phones will start getting sent out to customers this week... O'Brien said the company anticipates all pre-ordered phones to be delivered within the next several weeks... The company's 5G "47 Plan" is available for $47.45 a month, a nod to President Donald Trump's two presidential terms, according to the website... Customers will also have Trump(SM) displayed as the status bar in their network.
The Verge reported the phone was added last week to Google's public list of devices certified for Google Play, "usually one of the final steps before an Android phone is launched."
Trump Mobile may have broken radio silence partly in response to a recent wave of media coverage alleging that buyers had received emails notifying them that their preorders had been canceled, coverage that even made it onto Stephen Colbert's The Late Show... [T]here's seemingly no evidence of the alleged cancellation emails beyond unverified social media claims.
In January The Verge also questioned reports that 600,000 people preordered the Trump phone with a $100 deposit. "I can't find a shred of evidence that this figure is true," calling it "a microcosm of how the modern media landscape and AI chatbots can combine to give falsities the sheen of respectability."
I first saw the figure in, of all places, the Threads feed of California governor Gavin Newsom's press office, which had shared a screenshot of a tweet of a Grok summary making the claim. Trustworthy, right? The Grok post cites "reports from sources like Fortune, NPR, and The Guardian" for the 600,000 preorders, but a quick search of their recent output shows no sign of the number... India's Economic Times and Hindustan Times both reported a more specific figure of 590,000 preorders, referencing an unspecified Associated Press report as the source. [The Associated Press] VP of corporate communications, Lauren Easton, confirmed to me that "AP's original stories never contained such a number...."
Hindustan Times writer Shamik Banerjee called the citation "a typo," and told me that the figure was in fact taken from The Times of India. The Times of India story, which is bylined only to the newspaper's lifestyle desk, is more transparent in its sourcing: a viral post by a meme account... It's been covered by multiple publications, now presented as fact on MSN.com and tech site Phone Arena. And that coverage has helped it to filter into the chatbots and not just Grok — Gemini and ChatGPT were both happy to confirm to me that 600,000 T1 Phones have been ordered so far, the former falsely attributing the number to the Associated Press, and the latter to Phone Arena.
As for how many Trump Phone preorders have actually been placed? No one outside the company knows.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
