Is Trump T1 Just HTC Gold Painted?

Trump’s phone made headlines again this past week, after iFixit tore it apart and found it to be almost identical to the HTC U24 Pro, a Taiwanese phone released in mid-2024. I reviewed the T1 phone last month, and while it performs well as a middle-of-the-road phone, we have some related details here.

iFixit’s findings are in line with CNET’s first benchmark test, which also suggested a very close match to the HTC phone:

Trump’s Geekbench results for the phone put it on par with the HTC U24 Pro 5G and show it has an octa-core processor, which could be Snapdragon 7 Gen 3 released November 2023 — Trump Mobile is unclear.

The details of Trump’s phone we know also show an HTC phone. According to the Trump Mobile website, the T1 phone has these features:

• 6.78 inch AMOLED screen
• 50-megapixel wide-angle camera
• 8-megapixel ultrawide camera
• 50-megapixel 2x telephoto camera
• 50-megapixel front-facing camera
• 5,000-mAh battery
• An unnamed Qualcomm Snapdragon chip

Here are the specifications of the HTC U24 Pro:

• 6.78 inch AMOLED screen
• 50-megapixel wide-angle camera
• 8-megapixel ultrawide camera
• 50-megapixel 2x telephoto camera
• 50-megapixel front-facing camera
• 4,600-mAh battery
• Qualcomm Snapdragon 7 Gen 3 chipset

What (and where) is Trump’s phone?

The PR firm that works with Trump Mobile, which expedited the delivery of CNET’s Trump phone last month, told me Wednesday that it is no longer working with the company. The Trump Organization and Trump Mobile have not responded to my requests for comment, including when the phones will be shipped to all customers who paid a $100 deposit to pre-order one. It seems that few people have received their phones, and most of them are the media.

CNET got Trump’s call, NBC News got one, Bloomberg got one and, most recently, Snazzy Labs got T1 last week, a month after the calls were supposed to be made. is exported to customers. I scoured the Internet for real customers who have received the phone — according to The Guardian, more than 27,000 people have put down a $100 deposit — but can only find disgruntled people who don’t have a phone.

Snazzy Labs uploaded a very detailed YouTube video last week, and tore the phone apart to find the same thing: Aside from the larger battery capacity on the Trump phone, and the custom back cover, Snazzy Labs shows the phone’s interior and exterior are identical to the HTC phone.

“The similarity between these two phones is extraordinary,” he said in the video.

When Trump Mobile launches in June 2025 with $47.45-a-month mobile planfirst announced that Trump’s phone would be made in the US and launched in August 2025. But when it became clear that the production of large smartphones at home was not possible, Trump Mobile stopped them. “made in the US” claim.

In mid-April, the redesigned Trump Mobile website featured a new T1 phoneits third redesign. Among other things, one of my criticisms when testing that phone it was the lack of knowledge about it, including not knowing where it was made or by whom.

Nowhere on the phone’s packaging, manuals, website or the device itself does it say what country it was manufactured in. The box says “assembled in the USA,” but we don’t know to what extent — whether the parts were all assembled in the US, or the phone was just put in its packaging.

“The only place where the T1 could be made in a very short amount of time for the existing brand, with limited production numbers, and at the same price as the U24 Pro, is in the factories that have the tooling and manufacturing of this phone,” concluded iFixit after scanning and tearing the phone apart, suggesting that it may have been manufactured in Guangdong.

Perhaps the statement “assembled in the USA” is the same as the statement “ships this week”: it is true for one or two parts and the customer.