Trump Mobile T1 Phone teardown confirms it’s an HTC in disguise

The Trump Mobile T1 Phone was announced last year and went through quite a few design iterations in the meantime, but now seems to have been finalized. The phone has started shipping to some media outlets (around nine months after it was first promised to), and the actual device does look a lot like the HTC U24 Pro from 2024, just with a different color and back panel.

HTC U24 Pro

A teardown has now pretty much confirmed this. The teardown experts at iFixit have done their magic and exposed the fact that the two devices are nearly identical, just as we thought they would be.

Obviously, if this is the same device, then it’s most likely not made in the USA, as Trump Mobile’s initial marketing claimed. Now, they just say it’s assembled in the USA, which may still be true, there’s no way to 100% verify that claim.

Before you think HTC itself is making this phone, remember that the Taiwanese company sold its mobile division to Google many years ago, and ever since then it’s only been releasing very few devices each year, which are only available in a few markets.

This makes us think that HTC is working with a Chinese ODM, which basically created the design and builds the handset for HTC. And Trump Mobile may have contracted the same ODM, picking this model too, hence the near-identical design. ODMs have catalogs, and so this is actually quite easy to do.

Anyway, if that is the case then we assume that the Trump T1 is also powered by the Snapdragon 7 Gen 3 SoC just like the HTC U24 Pro. Trump Mobile only lists a “Snapdragon 7 Series” chip, without going into further detail.