Trump's $500 Trump T1 Phone Is Just a Gold-Painted HTC U24 Pro
Remember the promise of a glorious smartphone made entirely in the US? Well, turns out patriotism in 2025 looks exactly like a budget Taiwanese handset with a slightly bigger battery and a fresh coat of paint. Let's look inside this masterpiece of American engineering.
Hardware specialists at iFixit and journalists from NBC News recently ran both the new Trump T1 Phone and the Taiwanese HTC U24 Pro through a medical-grade CT scanner. The results were so identical that engineers literally transplanted the motherboard of the HTC phone into the Trump chassis, and the hybrid device booted up and worked perfectly without a single hiccup.
Under the hood, both devices share the exact same foundation, utilizing the Qualcomm Snapdragon 7 Gen 3 processor paired with 12GB of RAM and up to 512GB of storage. They even share the exact same legacy hardware features, such as the increasingly rare 3.5mm headphone jack and a microSD card slot, wrapped in a body with the same physical dimensions and screen curvature.
The differences between these twins are microscopic at best. While the HTC U24 Pro uses memory chips manufactured by SK Hynix, the Trump T1 Phone opts for memory from Micron. The physical LED flash on the back is also shifted by a fraction of a millimeter, and the bottom speaker grill got a tiny cosmetic redesign to help it pass as a distinct device.
The most notable modification is the battery. The Trump T1 Phone sports a slightly larger 5000 mAh battery compared to the 4600 mAh cell found in the HTC. Interestingly, this customized battery was manufactured in the Philippines rather than China, but the trade-off for this geographical pivot is a slower 30W charging speed limit.
This hardware overlap makes perfect sense because HTC previously announced they no longer design or manufacture phones for external clients, having sold most of their smartphone engineering team to Google back in 2017. Instead, both HTC and Trump Mobile likely outsourced their manufacturing to the same third-party original design manufacturer, which gladly sold them the exact same blueprints.
This revelation stands in stark contrast to the original marketing campaign for the Trump T1 Phone, which boldly promised a device fully manufactured within the United States. As production realities set in, the official marketing copy was quietly updated to claim the device was merely designed with American values in mind, with domestic teams assisting in quality assurance.
Slapping a famous name on a white-label device and selling it at a markup is the oldest trick in the tech book, but doing it under the banner of national pride elevates it to performance art. In the end, consumers are left paying a premium for a slightly larger battery that charges slower, all for the privilege of holding American values manufactured in the Philippines.
Source: NBC News
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