In case you missed it, there is now a Trump phone. Yes, really. And this week, we got to take it apart.
A couple of weeks ago I got my first look at the Trump Mobile T1 courtesy of NBC News over a brief Zoom call. My first impression: the Trump Mobile T1 looked exactly like 2024’s HTC U24 Pro.
But without access to the hardware, it was impossible to tell whether the T1 was a 1:1 copy of the U24 Pro or if deeper differences lay hidden inside. Moreover, given the amount of marketing that’s gone into the American pedigree of the device, I couldn’t tell what it meant for a phone to be made with “American values”. For that, I needed to crack it open, and that meant getting the NBC team to our San Luis Obispo office and the T1 on our teardown table.
CT Vision: The Non-Destructive Verdict
Before I cracked it open, I ran the phone through our Lumafield CT scanner. Even from the initial radiographs, the answer was clear: the internals are nearly an exact match for the HTC U24 Pro. Take a look for yourself.
We’d noticed on our Zoom inspection a couple of weeks ago that the camera lens and flash seemed to be in slightly different places. So I knew I’d need to get inside to figure out how different.
For the uninitiated, on Android phones that usually means going in through the back cover—and well, we already tore down the HTC U24 Pro in advance, so at this point we strongly suspected that the procedure would be the same.
Sure enough, I had an answer to that as soon as the back cover was off. The spring finger contacts on the flash hadn’t moved at all; instead, the flex cable was simply lengthened in what amounts to nothing more than a cosmetic change.
There was one other small cosmetic change: the speaker grille. The aluminium chassis, while almost identical, has holes that are machined out with a slightly different pattern.
The CT scan and our teardown make clear that this difference isn’t substantive. The speakers are the same. Their positioning is the same. Everything is the same, except the pattern of holes in the case.
I strongly suspect that someone wanted a phone that looked unique but thanks to the Trump Mobile team’s self-inflicted timeline, they were forced to abandon any fanciful goals involving a larger design change and settled for achievable ones: a small modification to the back cover and a repositioning of the flash.
In case you’re wondering, the 6.8” U24 Pro screen appears to be identical to the T1’s 6.78” screen. I’m not sure why the screens are listed with slightly different dimensions. There could be a small difference that I wasn’t able to measure.
What I can say with certainty is that 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 both in pixel density and layout.
Trace for Trace: Sourcing the Mainboard
Digging deeper into the phone reveals more of the same. As in the same component shapes, the same component placement, the same screw placements, and even the same anti-tamper sticker placements. Do you know what else is likely to be the same? The factories that made these parts. The biggest clue? The mainboard itself.
I’m willing to bet that trace for trace, this is the same board that’s in the HTC U24 Pro, complete with Qualcomm’s SM7550 System on Chip (SoC) aka the Snapdragon 7 Gen 3. While the SoC is the same, the multichip package housing 12GB LPDDR5 and 512GB storage is from Micron, whereas our HTC U24 Pro uses a package from SK Hynix. A relatively small difference, the change may have occurred due to supply chain limitations, tariff fee considerations, or any number of other benign reasons.
If they’re running on the same board, we should be able to swap a board into one from the other… and sure enough, here’s the HTC board running in its gold cousin’s body.
Sourcing ICs from multiple suppliers between production runs isn’t uncommon so I can confidently say that this is the same phone as the HTC U24 Pro, but with one key difference: the battery.
Higher Watt-Hours, Lower Volume: The Newlix Cell
The T1’s battery is larger, listed as 19.35 Wh (presumably the rated capacity as is legally required) compared to the HTC U24 Pro’s 17.23 Wh. Otherwise, the dimensions of the battery are comparable.
The battery cell is made in the Philippines by a company called Newlix Mfg Inc. They don’t have a website, but we do know it was registered with the Philippines Companies House in 2025. That’s roughly in line with when the T1 was announced.
The other notable difference with the T1 battery is that it’s limited to 30W charging, compared to the U24 Pro’s 60W charging. This is also reflected in the charger included in the box; the T1 comes with a 30W charger, whereas the U24 Pro comes with a 60W charger.
The Hard Math of Domestic Manufacturing
So what’s the big whoop about batteries from the Philippines? Well, the vast majority of batteries for consumer electronics are made in China. There’s several reasons for this but it mainly comes down to Chinese dominance over the raw materials that go into batteries and China’s manufacturing capacity. And price.
So seeing a battery cell made in the Philippines tells us that the T1 is unlikely to be selling in large volumes. This would be in line with the recent data breach that revealed Trump Mobile’s combined sales of phones and plans was in the region of 30,000, well short of earlier claims of 600,000 smartphone pre-orders.
It’s also a clue as to what parts might feasibly be assembled in the United States. The claim is that the phone is being assembled from around 10 components by a team in Florida. This battery could be one of those components, along with the camera modules, speakers, the USB-C module, the haptic engine, and the mainboard. If that is indeed what’s happening, I’d wager that the chassis and display are imported as a pre-assembled unit owing to the difficulty of installing curved glass displays.
Let’s be clear though; none of this means the T1 is made in the USA. In fact, the FTC is very clear about the requirements that need to be met before a device can be labeled as “Made in America.” They’re less clear about what the requirements are for a device to be assembled in the USA.
The validity of the “Assembled in the USA” markings aside, the big question for many is why can’t a smartphone be made in the US? Again, there are lots of reasons but the big ones are the absence of the necessary manufacturing base, the lack of expertise in the labour pool, and cost. Bringing any part of the production line to the US, even the simpler non-electronic components like the chassis and the back cover, would put upward pressure on the price of the final product.
And say what you will about the T1, but let’s give credit where it’s due. Trump Mobile aren’t gouging their fanbase…not yet anyway. Against all expectations, the T1 is actually well priced when compared to the equivalently specced 512GB U24 Pro, and the only things you give up are the 60W fast charging and your dignity.
That’s not to say that smartphone manufacturing can never be brought to the US, but it’s going to take more than just a trade war and the endorsement of Donald’s least favourite spawn to do it. It needs investment, not just in high tech manufacturing but also in people and skills, and a multidecade bipartisan vision that puts the nation’s interests before populist fervor.
If you genuinely want to put your money where your patriotism is, be prepared to pay for it. Right now, the $2,000 Liberty Phone is the best you’re going to get for a truly American made device; even there, they can only claim the “electronics” are made in the US.
Peeling Back the Faux-Gold Veneer
HTC sold a significant portion of their smartphone talent to Google in 2017 and shifted away from first party manufacturing. For a device like 2024’s U24 Pro to exist, HTC relied entirely on Original Design Manufacturers (ODM) in China. That’s not unusual. Outside of the Apples, Googles, and Huaweis of the market, most smartphone manufacturers use an ODM to design and manufacture their phones. Whether those designs are exclusive or not depends on the contract.
So far HTC has been mostly silent on the existence of the T1. That might mean that they either sold the rights to the design of the U24 Pro to Trump Mobile, or (in my opinion the more likely scenario) they never owned the rights to the design in the first place.
Given that fact, the only place the T1 could have been made in the very short time the brand has existed, in the limited quantities it’s being produced, and at the same price point as the U24 Pro, is at the factories with preexisting tooling and production lines for this phone. That factory appears to be in Guangdong, China as The Verge’s Dom Preston points out.
Put those bits of information together and what you have is not an “American-Proud Design”, but a phone designed in China, made in China, with the vast majority of parts sourced from China. I’m failing to find any stirring of American pride within me. I’ve certainly felt it before, so I can confirm that it is absent at this time.
The Final Verdict
Both phones deserve praise for their initial accessibility, but a device is only as repairable as its individual parts. Two years after its launch, the HTC U24 Pro has no publicly accessible service manuals or official spare parts available. Combined with the notorious lack of long-term software support for white-label ODM devices, the hardware can only be described as fundamentally disposable.
For that reason, the HTC U24 Pro earns a Repairability Score of 3/10 while the Trump Mobile T1 earns a Provisional Score of 3/10.
If Trump Mobile surprises the industry by bucking the ODM trend and releasing independent service manuals and a dedicated parts catalog, we will gladly revise this score. Until then, it inherits the flaws of its architecture.
