The Trump Phone Looks Suspiciously Like a HTC U24 Pro - iFixit

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In case you hadn’t heard, there’s a Trump phone now. Last June, an announcement from Trump Tower promised a new wireless service with its very own phone, “Made in America.”

We were skeptical, knowing how little of the smartphone manufacturing pipeline exists in America. When we saw the first renders, we were even more skeptical: it looked suspiciously like a S24/25 Ultra. But that was before anyone had seen the hardware.

A couple of months ago, Dom Preston from The Verge got a sneak preview of Trump Mobile’s T1 Phone. What he saw was enough to raise the question: was this nothing more than a reskinned HTC U24 Pro? He was definitely on to something, so I ordered the HTC phone in prep for our own teardown—assuming our T1 phone would ever arrive.

Then last week the folks over at NBC reached out. They had a phone, the first to get one by the looks of things, and they wanted to see what we would make of it. I had the HTC U24 Pro in hand, and over a Zoom call Brian Cheung and I compared the two devices.

Let me tell you, they’re almost identical. The speaker grille, camera placements, headphone jack…everything except the rear MEMS microphone, flash, and the rear camera housing.

HTC U24 Pro (left) and Trump Mobile T1 (right)

There’s more than just stylistic impersonation here though. Reliable information is scarce, and for various reasons it’s not possible to rely on the scant details listed on Trump Mobile’s own website. But thanks to FCC filings, we know for sure that the T1 supports Bluetooth 5.3 just like the U24 Pro.

That 5.3 seems like a minor detail but it’s a significant one. The most popular running theory right now is that the T1 is a reskinned Revvl 7 Pro, a significantly cheaper Chinese manufactured smartphone that also incorporates a headphone jack and a microSD reader. The Revvl 7 Pro only supports Bluetooth 5.2, and looks nothing like the T1 phone NBC received.

A slightly older Bluetooth chip wouldn’t normally be enough to rule out a custom order Revvl phone, but when you factor in the T1’s overall design similarities with the U24 Pro, then it seems less and less likely to be a Revvl.

T-Mobile Revvl 7 Pro (left) and Trump Mobile T1 (right)

Add to that Trump Mobile’s pivot from “Made in America” to “Made with American Values” with components sourced from “a favoured nation,” then the made in Taiwan HTC U24 Pro becomes a very strong contender. As the phrase goes: if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck… covered in gold and stamped with a US flag missing two of its stripes. A wonky duck to be sure, but still a duck.

The big question that still remains unanswered, whether it turns out to be an HTC reskin or not, is this: where were the components made? I have my suspicions, as we all do, but we’ll know for sure once the hardware is in our hands.

There is that tiny difference on the back cover that I’ve been noodling on. My guess? The flash mechanism in the HTC U24 Pro is incorporated into the wireless charging assembly. It would be exceedingly easy to reroute that flash to move it up or down slightly, especially if that change gets incorporated into the back cover itself. Same goes for that external camera bump, a feature of the back cover rather than a critical internal component.

Source: Trump Mobile

I’m less sure about the placement of the MEMS mic; we’ll have to wait for the teardown to see where that’s gone, if it moved at all. And of course, there’s always the chance that the insides of this phone will be completely different. Unlikely, given Trump Mobile had 9 months to pull this phone out of a hat. Who knows: if and when these start shipping, it might be none of the above.

While we wait for a phone, here’s the NBC story with a special guest appearance by Lumafield’s very own Scanly Tucci in the background (did you know we named our beloved Neptune scanner?).

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