Trump Mobile’s T1 Phone is an HTC U24 Pro wearing a loud yellow finish as if it were burnished gold.
Trump Mobile is reportedly flogging the T1 Phone at an “introductory price” of $499. The HTC U24 Pro starts at $470, which makes the whole flag-waving exercise look a bit thin.
Trump Mobile made the T1 Phone’s supposedly made-in-America credentials a big part of its early marketing noise. It later softened that to “assembled in America,” but iFixit’s teardown suggests even that line is not true either.
According to iFixit, Trump Mobile tried to make the HTC U24 Pro look different, but only managed minor cosmetic tweaks. The camera and flash LED sit slightly differently on the T1 Phone, apparently due to a longer flex cable.
The “spring finger contacts on the flash hadn’t moved at all.” The T1 Phone’s speaker grille has holes drilled in a slightly different pattern, but the speakers beneath are the same and sit in the same place. It is form before function, with just enough surface fiddling to give casual buyers a whiff of plausible deniability.
Both the HTC U24 Pro and T1 Phone have a 6.8-inch screen, yet Trump Mobile still claims the T1 has a 6.78-inch display. Presumably, it is betting that buyers will not break out a ruler to check the 0.2mm difference.
“Both screens utilise a PenTile display using Samsung’s patented Diamond Pixel arrangement. A side-by-side comparison of the two displays using Evident Microscopy’s DSX2000 clearly shows a perfect match between the two panels, in pixel density and layout,” iFixit said.
The biggest clue is buried on the board. iFixit said the same factory made the mainboard for the HTC U24 Pro and the T1 Phone.
The SoC is the same, although the “multichip package housing 12GB LPDDR5 and 512GB storage [on the T1] is from Micron,” iFixit said its HTC U24 Pro test unit used a package from SK Hynix, probably because of supply-chain availability rather than wizardry.
iFixit swapped the T1 board into the U24 Pro, and the phone booted with an HTC logo. That is the sort of patriotic flourish marketing departments tend to leave out.
To be fair, the battery is different. The T1 Phone has a 19.35Wh battery, compared with 17.23Wh in the HTC U24 Pro. The charger is less impressive. The T1 ships with a 30W charger, while the HTC U24 Pro comes with a 60W unit.
Other T1 Phone specs include a 50MP main rear camera, a 50MP selfie camera, a 5,000mAh battery, 512GB of storage and a 3.5mm headphone jack.
A 128GB HTC U24 Pro is currently available for about $470, while the 512GB version sells for as much as $557. That means Trump Mobile appears to have hit $499 by trimming the charging package and leaning on volume pricing for what is basically a two-year-old phone.
Memory prices are climbing, so it is no great shock that Trump Mobile calls the $499 tag an “introductory price.” The outfit only says the later price for the T1 Phone will be “less than $1,000,” which is quite a range for a rebadged handset.
Given the T1 Phone’s limited availability and its queasy yellow finish, buyers may find the patriotism wears off long before the battery does. At that point, they are left with an overpriced Android slab in a colour usually reserved for warning signs, budget mustard, and regrettable kitchen appliances.
