PERSONAL TECH

iFixit teardown reveals two-year-old, mid-range, Chinese Android

It won't be making smartphones great again. The long-awaited Trump-branded smartphone has finally arrived, and it appears to be exactly what many suspected: an existing handset in gold drag.

Repair biz iFixit got its hands on the Trump Mobile T1 after the device became available in May, and its teardown found the model is essentially an HTC U24 Pro with cosmetic tweaks and a Trump-friendly gold finish.

It was almost exactly a year ago that the Trump Organization unveiled the Trump Mobile cellular service and heralded the coming of the T1 Phone, described as "a sleek, gold smartphone engineered for performance and proudly designed and built in the United States."

Few expected the gilt gadget to live up to that promise, as there are effectively no mass-market smartphones built in the US, with the possible exception of Purism's Liberty Phone, which is priced at a challenging $1,999 for those who absolutely must have a smartphone made outside China.

Despite accepting $100 deposits to pre-order the coveted handwarmer, Trump Mobile failed to deliver the device by August last year, as promised, and many started to believe it would never show up. But it arrived this May amid claims that the Trump Mobile website was leaking customer data to anyone who sent an HTTP POST request.

The nerds at iFixit passed the Trump Phone through a CT scanner alongside an HTC U24 Pro to confirm that the internals of the two devices are almost an exact match.

They even went so far as swapping the main board of the T1 for that of the HTC phone, and showed that it not only fits, but the phone still works.

One difference iFixit noted is that the multichip package housing the 12 GB of  LPDDR5 memory and 512 GB of storage is from Micron, whereas the corresponding package in HTC's phone is supplied by SK hynix.

The HTC U24 Pro is a mid-range smartphone that was launched almost exactly two years ago in June 2024. It is based on the Qualcomm Snapdragon 7 Gen 3 platform, has a 6.8-inch display, and came with Android 14 at launch, whereas the Trump phone features Android 15.

In other words, it's a fairly unremarkable smartphone, sprayed gold and marketed to Trump fans for a promotional price of $499. To be fair, as iFixit makes clear, this is not a bad price for a device like this, so aureate wannabes are not being overcharged here.

But as iFixit also makes clear, the device may be assembled in Florida, but it was designed in China and the vast majority of its parts have been sourced from and made in China as well. ®