• Tech
• Mobile
• Phones

I Tested the Trump Phone for 96 Hours. Here's What It's Really Like

CNET has the Trump phone, and we put it through its paces over the long weekend to see how it matches up with other foreign-made phones.

Corinne Reichert

David Lumb

Patrick Holland

May 27, 2026 7:47 a.m. PT

The T1 Trump Phone Is the Same Color as Scrooge McDuck's Gold Coins

May 27, 2026 at 7:46 AM PDT

Now that I've been using the phone for four days, I've put together a list of the most frustrating features of the T1.

The main camera: It just isn't as good as the cameras on my 3-year-old Samsung Galaxy S23 Plus, as photos from the T1 have inaccurately bright colors -- though the oversaturation works well for vivid pictures of scenery -- and in how long it takes to capture a photo. For the latter issue, there's a split second between pressing the on-screen shutter button and the photo actually being taken, which often means missing out on the best shot possible, as well as making action shots blurry.

The matte gold design: Maybe it's my fault for handing it to my curious 3-year-old child, who noticed I had a "new yellow phone" while she was eating dinner, but the matte gold material doesn't handle not-so-clean hands well. Her fingerprints showed up immediately. I could wipe them away, but when I tested this with my matte pink Samsung phone, the fingerprints didn't show up in the first place. And, as previously mentioned, I'm not the biggest fan of the phone's gold color. I feel like a bright, shiny gold would have been nicer -- or, if it had to be matte, I'd prefer a shade closer to champagne than mustard (or urine).

Lack of information: 

• We don't know what exact processor this phone is powered by. The site simply says that it's a Snapdragon chip from Qualcomm, and no specs are listed in the manual or on the box. 
• There's no Google Wallet app preinstalled on the phone, and we don't know whether tap-to-pay works for transactions at stores and restaurants, though the phone does have NFC capabilities.
• We also don't know where it was made or who made it. Investigations have suggested that it's likely a reskinned HTC U24 Pro, but nowhere on the box, website or phone itself does it say which country it was manufactured in. The box says it was "assembled in the USA," but we don't know to what extent -- whether the parts were all put together in the US, or if the phone was just put in its packaging.

Security: As we previously posted, the Trump Mobile website suffered a potential data vulnerability, which might have exposed every customer who made an online account to buy this phone. It's also unclear how long anyone can safely use the Trump phone itself: while Samsung and Google offer seven years of Android OS and security updates for their phones, Trump Mobile hasn't said how many years of software updates the T1 will be receiving, if any.

May 26, 2026 at 3:19 PM PDT

I just finished testing the call quality on the Trump phone. While it was generally fine to make calls on, I did notice less noise cancellation than on my Samsung Galaxy S23 Plus, with louder background noise on the other end of the line. It was clear enough that I could hear my colleague, CNET Mobile Managing Editor David Lumb, just fine during a voice call Tuesday afternoon, though his voice sounded a bit tinny.

May 26, 2026 at 3:40 PM PDT

We put the Trump T1 through the same series of battery-draining tests that we use for all of our phone reviews. Starting from fully charged, a 45-minute stress test of varying tasks like video calls and streaming media, the T1 dropped 10% -- which is lower than comparable phones released today. Similarly, a 3-hour YouTube session dropped the phone down to 78%, which is matched or beaten by other smartphones (the iPhone 17 only dipped to 89%, for instance). For further comparison, the basic Samsung Galaxy S26 dropped down to 92%, while the Google Pixel 10A dropped to just 95%.

But these results aren't too surprising given some contextual suppositions of the T1's specs, which we've listed out in earlier blog posts. If it is indeed a rebranded HTC U24 Pro 5G, which was first announced in June 2024, then the T1 is powered by a Snapdragon 7 Gen 3 chip, which isn't as top-of-the-line as the silicon in other phones. The T1 is also running Android 15, which is two versions ahead of the software that the HTC U24 Pro 5G launched with. 

In summary, it's likely that the less powerful and less efficient Snapdragon 7 Gen 3 combined with a newer Android version speeds up battery drain compared to phones released this year with more current or more efficient chips.

May 26, 2026 at 2:15 PM PDT

If you preordered a Trump phone and your personal details may have been leaked, now is a good time to mention CNET's guidance on the best identity theft protection and also how to freeze your credit.

Trump Mobile has yet to respond to a request for comment on how many people were affected by the data breach or what data was leaked.

May 26, 2026 at 12:27 PM PDT

On Friday, Trump Mobile suffered a data leak, according to a report by The Guardian. Names and personal details for an estimated 27,000 people were leaked. Trump Mobile told The Guardian that it was working with a cybersecurity team to investigate whether the incident occurred and its scope.

May 26, 2026 at 8:51 AM PDT

The T1 Trump Mobile phone comes with a tiny square starter guide. The English-only instructions highlight some of the phone's features, including NFC. But Google Wallet isn't installed by default, and it's hard to tell whether you can use the Trump Phone to tap and pay at stores and restaurants. 

The other curious part of the manual is that SGG-06 is the Trump phone's official model number.

May 26, 2026 at 3:17 PM PDT

As someone who drops their phone a lot, the first thing I do when I buy a new device is get a phone case. One big pro for the Trump phone is that it comes with a clear case (I assume so that everyone can still see the bright gold T1). It's something I wish more phone-makers would do. The case admittedly feels a little flimsier than I'd normally choose, and the tiny, English-only manual in the box doesn't include the case's specs, so I can't be sure how much protection it affords. I have, however, already dropped the phone once, and it survived, with a very minor scratch to the case.

Reception has been great, since Trump Mobile is "powered" by Liberty Mobile Wireless, an MVNO based in Florida that runs on the T-Mobile network.

The phone's battery has been good with regular use, though it lagged behind 2025 and 2026 phones by the major phonemakers when I took it through CNET's stringent battery tests on Tuesday.

The lack of bloatware was also a pleasant surprise. It only came with two additional apps, as I mentioned earlier (one being President Trump's social media network, Truth Social). This is certainly better than my Samsung phone, which installs at least three random games every time there's an overnight software update without my consent.

I also have to give an honorable mention to the automatically filtered selfie camera, since this feature has been popular with everyone I've demonstrated it to.

May 25, 2026 at 6:18 PM PDT

Customers who put down the $100 deposit for the Trump T1 phone didn't just suffer delays to their orders -- their data was also potentially leaked after an exploit was discovered on the Trump Mobile website, as reported earlier by PCMag. 

"At this time, the impacted information appears to be limited to certain customer details, including names, email addresses, mailing addresses, order identifiers and mobile phone numbers," read a statement from Trump Mobile to PCMag.

The issue came to light last week, when a viewer reportedly reached out to YouTubers Coffeezilla and Cr1TiKaL, both of whom had put money down for the T1 phone. Through an exploit, the viewer gained access to the preorder website's back-end and wasn't just able to place fake preorders -- they could also scrape and search the entire customer database. They reached out with supposedly benign intentions, frustrated that their data was also vulnerable, hoping the YouTubers would use their platform to get the issue addressed.

The exposed data doesn't include financial information, but it does reportedly show a plain ledger for how many people ordered a Trump phone. There are only around 10,000 orders for the T1 phone, and about 30,000 phones sold, YouTuber Coffeezilla (through his alternate account Voidzilla) said in a video. That's far below the nearly 600,000 T1 orders that news reports had previously claimed. 

"Out of an abundance of caution, our third-party platform provider has implemented additional safeguards and enhanced monitoring measures while the matter continues to be investigated with the assistance of independent cybersecurity professionals. We are also evaluating any applicable notification obligations," Trump Mobile said in a statement to PCMag.

Trump Mobile did not respond to a request for comment by the time of publication on how many phones were preordered, how many have shipped, when the others will ship, how many people were impacted by the data breach or what data was leaked.

May 25, 2026 at 2:38 PM PDT

I shot some macro photos around Sonoma yesterday. You do have to tap around the screen on the subjects you want to come into focus, but it handled the close-up shots nicely. The same color issues of added vibrance continued to plague Trump phone photos, however -- for instance, in the photo below, the person's hair is brown, not red (it did capture the individual strands of hair well, though). 

And on the plus side, the color saturation benefited photos taken of California's wildflowers, making them appear even more vivid.

May 25, 2026 at 10:42 AM PDT

The Trump phone has a 2x telephoto camera with optical zoom and has up to 30x digital zoom. Here are some samples to show off its zoom range. I took these four pictures in Sonoma on Sunday afternoon: the first is with 1x zoom, the second with 2x (with the phone's dedicated telephoto camera), the rest were digital zoom: with the third image at 5x and the fourth at 10x.

The zoom is passable, but it loses quality pretty quickly after 2x -- the detail on the last two pictures, in particular, looks soft and hazy.

As a reminder, the T1 Trump phone has a 50-megapixel wide, an 8-megapixel ultrawide and a 50-megapixel 2x telephoto camera.

May 24, 2026 at 1:51 PM PDT

One of the most common questions I've received over the past couple of days of testing this phone is how the reception is and whether it has good coverage.

Trump Mobile is a mobile virtual network operator, like Mint Mobile (which runs on the T-Mobile network, too). MVNOs don't have their own networks; instead, they buy wholesale coverage from the big carriers -- AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile here in the US.

When it launched in 2025, Trump Mobile's website noted that it was "powered" by Liberty Mobile Wireless, an MVNO based in Florida that runs on the T-Mobile network, so it has great coverage. It often has 5G in places my Verizon-connected Samsung Galaxy S23 Plus doesn't, which, since the speed-testing site Ookla named T-Mobile the best mobile network in the US after six months of testing. (Disclosure: Ookla is owned by the same parent company as CNET, Ziff Davis.)

May 24, 2026 at 12:00 PM PDT

The issues I had with the Trump phone's 50-megapixel main camera's shots in bright daylight seemed to diminish as the sun went down and the light faded. Its tendency to oversaturate images with color means it performs well in low light, picking up on details and some neon lighting at the party where I was taking photos.

If you zoom in really far, details get a little less sharp than you'd hope, though.

May 24, 2026 at 10:35 PM PDT

If you bought a Trump phone hoping to make a statement, I have some bad news for you: Not one person at a party of over 100 people I attended knew what it was and certainly not by sight. When showing others the phone, I had to direct them to look at the block-lettered "Trump Mobile" below the 11-striped American flag before they knew what it was. Even two Trump supporters I tracked down at the party hadn't heard of the phone before.

I got a lot of questions about the Trump Mobile network (it appears to piggyback off T-Mobile's 5G and 4G LTE coverage), and comments about the gold being the color of pee. One teenager said it looked cool, while another refused to touch it. One person asked a very polite but direct question about what exactly I was doing with a Trump phone -- but the overwhelming reaction was one of bemusement, a puzzled look and a brief question about it before moving on with their night.

May 24, 2026 at 9:36 AM PDT

I brought the Trump phone to a party on Saturday night (more on that later) and continued putting the cameras to the test.

May 23, 2026 at 7:07 PM PDT

Yep, you can change the "Trump Mobile" navy blue wallpaper that the phone comes with! As a standard Android phone, you can customize the look, apps and more.

I changed the wallpaper to an image I took at the County Fair today, showing an emotional support pickle plush toy along with other prizes.

May 23, 2026 at 6:04 PM PDT

One of the curious discoveries I made when first setting up the T1 Trump Mobile phone was that it added a watermark to the photos I took. If you look at the bottom of the images above, there's a "T1" mark on the left corner and a date and timestamp on the right corner. In fairness to Trump Mobile, other Android phone-makers also have a watermark on by default, such as gaming phones from RedMagic. You can turn off the watermark in the camera app's settings. However, any photo that you took before turning the watermark off will still have it "burned" onto the image.

May 23, 2026 at 5:04 PM PDT

When Trump Mobile launched in June 2025, the company announced that a Trump phone would be made in the US and launch in August 2025. But when it became obvious that domestic large-scale smartphone manufacturing would not be possible, Trump Mobile dropped the "made in the US" claim. 

Now, the site simply says it is "designed with American values in mind," an "American-proud design" and "shaped by American innovation."

While Trump Mobile has not said where the T1 phone is manufactured, executives told The Verge back in February that it's being made in a "favored nation" with "final assembly" in Florida. It's unclear what qualifies another nation as "favored" to handle most of the assembly of the T1 phone.

Nowhere on the phone, box, manual or packaging does it say where the phone was made. The box simply says, "Proudly assembled in the USA."

May 23, 2026 at 4:29 PM PDT

The photo on the left was taken with my Samsung phone, and on the right, the Trump phone. The image from the Trump phone is brighter, but the colors are skewed. Samsung's photo looks more lifelike.

This baby goat sitting in wood chips looked sharper on my 3-year-old Galaxy S23 Plus than on the T1 Trump mobile phone. Notice the texture of the goat's fur in both shots. Also, the edges of the wood chips and dried grass look softer and out of focus in the Trump phone image.

The phone cameras performed similarly when I took these pictures of a sand sculpture. The colors were slightly off in the Trump phone pic.

May 23, 2026 at 2:00 PM PDT

I was pleasantly surprised by how little bloatware came on the Trump phone. Besides Android's various apps -- like Chrome, Drive, Gemini, Meet, Photos, Maps, YouTube and Calendar -- and the usual phone apps like calculator, camera, clock, phone and contacts, it came with just two other apps preinstalled: Trump's social media network Truth Social and telemedicine app Doctegrity. Access to Doctegrity is included in Trump Mobile subscriptions, though I'm not sure that I'd share too many personal details via an app.

There have been some questions about whether you can uninstall Truth Social, so I tried it. There's no uninstall option when you long-press on the app, as you get for Android apps on a Samsung phone, but when you long-press, then hit App info, there is an Uninstall button after that.

May 23, 2026 at 10:50 AM PDT

Benchmarks are just that. When I used the Trump phone, it was fine for everyday tasks like scrolling news feeds, loading webpages and playing YouTube videos. It's worth keeping in mind that most new phones have powerful processors as a hedge to make sure they can still perform well with the latest OS and apps five to seven years from now. So whatever processor is in the T1 phone will likely not be powerful enough to keep up with newer software in the coming years.

May 23, 2026 at 8:43 AM PDT

According to the Trump Mobile website, the Trump phone has these specs: 

• 6.78-inch AMOLED screen
• 50-megapixel front-facing camera
• Rear cameras: 50-megapixel wide, 8-megapixel ultrawide and 50-megapixel 2x telephoto
• 5,000-mAh battery
• Unnamed Qualcomm Snapdragon chip

These specs are very similar to the HTC U24 Pro, a Taiwanese phone released in mid-2024 that costs around $450 to $500 for an unlocked model. It has:

• 6.78-inch AMOLED screen
• 50-megapixel front-facing camera
• Rear cameras: 50-megapixel wide, 8-megapixel ultrawide and 50-megapixel 2x telephoto
• 4,600-mAh battery
• Qualcomm Snapdragon 7 Gen 3 chipset

It's been suggested on Reddit and a community note on this X post that the Trump phone could be a modified version of T-Mobile's Revvl 7 Pro, which sold for $250 when it was launched in 2024. The Revvl 7 Pro has:

• 6.78-inch AMOLED display
• 8-megapixel front-facing camera
• Rear cameras: 50-megapixel wide, a 5-megapixel ultrawide, a 2-megapixel macro and a 2-megapixel depth camera
• 5,000-mAh battery
• Qualcomm Snapdragon 6 Gen 1 chipset

One other suggested contender is the 2022 Motorola Moto G, which has:

• 6.5-inch LCD display
• 3-megapixel front-facing camera
• Rear cameras: 50-megapixel wide, 2-megapixel macro lens and a 2-megapixel depth lens.
• 5,000-mAh battery
• MediaTek Helio G88 chipset

May 22, 2026 at 9:32 PM PDT

When I unboxed the T1 Trump Mobile phone, I was surprised by how much was included with the gold handset. There was a case, a wall plug (you don't see that with most phones these days), documentation, a SIM card tool and a gold braided USB-C cable. Take a look at my unboxing and very first impressions of the Trump phone in this TikTok video.

May 22, 2026 at 5:48 PM PDT

Using the charger and cable that came in the box, it took just under an hour to fully charge the Trump phone. Not too bad, depending on how much of a hurry you're in, but it's certainly longer than it takes my Samsung Galaxy S23 Plus to charge. For reference, the Trump phone has a 5,000-mAh battery, while my 3-year-old S23 Plus only has a 4,563-mAh capacity. But the Samsung phone supports 45-watt wired charging and the T1 Trump Mobile device has a 30-watt top-wired charging speed.

May 22, 2026 at 5:15 PM PDT

After an 80-minute round trip to pick up the Trump phone from my local FedEx after it was overnighted by my colleague Patrick Holland, my first thought on opening the box was: This is not the shade of matte gold I would have chosen for my flagship phone. It was kind of giving dehydrated pee vibes.

The phone's battery was dead on arrival, although Patrick notes that when he first took it out of the box, it was sitting at 53%, and he had it on nonstop during a live Q&A show and when he took photos and never charged it. So, this phone could potentially have a pretty decent battery life.

One of the only specs Trump Mobile has shared is that it has a 5,000-mAh battery. Paired with an efficient processor, likely the Qualcomm Snapdragon 7 Gen 3, it could last for a long time. I'll be running it through some battery tests in the coming days.

For now, I'm timing how long it takes to charge using the supplied 30-watt Trump phone charger.

May 22, 2026 at 2:08 PM PDT

One of the surprises we found when powering up the T1 phone for the first time is that it runs a close-to-stock version of Android 15. There isn't a "TrumpOS" software layer on top. Many phone makers will add their own software to a phone with Android as its foundation. Samsung has its One UI software, sometimes called a skin, but at its core, it's still Android. By contrast, Google, which makes Android, doesn't have that additional software layer on its Pixel phones.

Even though the Trump phone runs what appears to be a clean version of Android, it comes with the Doctegrity and Truth Social apps preinstalled. But how long is Trump Mobile committed to keeping the T1 phone's software up to date?

Samsung and Google each offer seven years of OS updates (think from Android 16 to 17) and seven years of security updates for the phones they sell -- and that includes phones like the $499 Pixel 10A. It's not clear how Trump Mobile will handle updates. If the T1 Trump Mobile phone is indeed based on the HTC U24 Pro 5G, that puts it at a disadvantage, since that HTC phone launched in 2024. Even if Trump Mobile were to match Motorola's 3-year commitment to OS and security updates for its budget phones, the T1's hardware might still limit its longevity.

May 22, 2026 at 10:28 AM PDT

As previously reported, we can confirm that the Trump phone features the wrong number of stripes on the American flag.

There are supposed to be 13 stripes representing the 13 original colonies of the United States, but the flag printed on the back of this golden phone has only 11.

The US flag does have the requisite 50 stars, however.