Teardown Confirms the Trump Phone Is a Gold-Painted HTC U24 Pro - iFixit

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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.

T1 (top) and U24 Pro (bottom) flash and wireless charging assemblies and mainboards

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.

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...