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Ever since it was announced, tech journalists wondered whether president Donald Trump’s “Trump Mobile” smartphone would ever see the light of day.
The gaudy-looking golden smartphone, dubbed Trump Mobile T1, finally landed in the hands of a larger pool of tech reviewers this week — and as it turns out, suspicions that it was a shoddily-repackaged phone by Chinese manufacturer HTC were entirely warranted.
A recent teardown by repair company iFixit confirmed that the T1 is an almost entirely unmodified HTC U24 Pro, a two-year-old and mid-tier Android phone, with a cheap coat of gold coloration. Even swapping the mainboard of the T1 with one taken straight out of a U24 Pro worked just fine, confirming once and for all Trump is selling an entirely Chinese smartphone, despite waging an economic war against the country.
Apart from minuscule changes to the speaker grille and a lengthened flex cable, iFixit concluded that “everything is the same, except the pattern of holes in the case.”
It’s the sad conclusion of something we’ve come to expect for months now. At first, the dubious mobile phone’s marketing material put claims that it was entirely made in the US front and center, only for its website to mysteriously alter its copy in January, claiming it’s an “American-proud” design instead, whatever that means.
Trump Mobile spent over a year delaying timelines and dragging its feet when customers, who had paid the $100 deposit, started asking questions.
“I strongly suspect that someone wanted a phone that looked unique but thanks to the Trump Mobile team’s self-inflicted timeline,” iFixit’s Shahram Mokhtari wrote, “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.”
The company is unlikely to make a big splash in an already extremely crowded smartphone market. According to a recent data breach, Trump Mobile is hoping to sell around 30,000 phones, a tiny fraction of the 600,000 preorders the company claimed to have received.
“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,” Mokhtari concluded. “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,” he added.
More on the phone: MAGA in Shambles as Trump’s “Made in America” Phone Crumbles Into Dust
