Where’s the Trump phone? We’re going to keep talking about it every week. We’ve reached out, as usual, to ask about the Trump phone’s whereabouts, and have stopped getting a response. This week, thanks to a reader tip, we think we’ve found the original phone the T1 is based on.
A long time ago, back when the Trump phone was but a single, inaccurate render and a contradictory spec sheet, we tried to figure out what other phone it might be based on. Now, eight months, two spec overhauls, and one redesign later, I have a good guess: the HTC U24 Pro.
I didn’t spot this by myself. A reader first tipped me off to the similarities between the U24 Pro and the Trump phone I revealed a few weeks ago, which are numerous: a similar angled body and curved display, a unique front sensor array, and broadly similar specs, including oddities like a headphone jack and microSD card support.
Let’s get one thing out the way at the top: I’m pretty sure HTC isn’t secretly building the Trump phone. Sohaib Ahmed, the company’s global director of PR, told me as much: “HTC does not design or manufacture phones for third parties.” But that doesn’t rule out another company playing a part in designing or building both phones, and given just how similar they look, I suspect that’s exactly what happened.
The U24 Pro is an odd phone in its own right. It launched in 2024 for €549 (around $600 at the time), and was heralded in some corners as a return from the dead for HTC, despite the fact that it followed the U23 Pro a year earlier, and a string of smaller releases that targeted the Asian market. HTC, once one of the major players in the Android phone industry, had been greatly diminished ever since selling a large part of its smartphone business to Google for $1.1 billion in 2017.
Both the T1 Phone and the U24 Pro share a slightly asymmetric angular frame, jutting out into a point along every edge, with a heavily curved screen on the front. I cannot think of, nor find, another phone that is quite the same shape — even small details like the positions of the antenna lines around the power and volume buttons line up. Even more telling is the set of sensors along each phone’s top. The U24 Pro splits up its speaker grill, notification LED, and proximity sensor into three, resulting in an unusual design with a long bar, a small dot for the LED, and then a second shorter bar, at the point where the display meets the phone’s top. What looks like the same sensor design can be clearly seen on the Trump phone I was shown, though I can’t confirm that the sensors themselves are the same, or that the T1 Phone will also have a notification LED.
Other details are subtler. It’s hard to tell exactly from the glimpses I got of the Trump phone, but along the top frame it certainly looks to have both a headphone jack and a microphone in the exact same positions as on the HTC device. Even having a headphone jack in the first place is evidence of the phones’ connection, given how rare the feature is in modern devices. The same can be said for the fact that both phones include a microSD card slot, sharing support for up to 1TB cards on top of a base 512GB of storage.
While the rear cameras look completely different, which seems to scupper my theory, look again: The U24 Pro’s cameras are split into a pair close together, with a third lens lower down. The new Trump phone sets all its cameras in one mount, but they’re unevenly spaced, with a larger gap between the second and third lenses. These cameras may look totally different on the surface, but I suspect that underneath you’ll find they’re similar. And what we know of the specs matches too: Trump Mobile told me that its phone will have 50-megapixel sensors for both the main and selfie cameras, and my glimpse of its camera UI showed an ultrawide and a 2x zoom option — all of which you’ll find on the U24 Pro.
Assuming that the two phones are essentially the same, does the U24 Pro tell us any more about what to expect from the T1? It’s powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 7 Gen 3, matching what I’d been told about a Snapdragon 7-series chip in the Trump phone. The U24 Pro has a 6.8-inch OLED display, 60W wired charging and even wireless charging support, and an IP67 rating for dust and water protection. There’s reason to be cautious reading too much into the spec sheet, though: The U24 Pro released with a 4,600mAh battery, smaller than the 5,000mAh capacity I’ve been told will be in the Trump phone. If that spec differs, then other elements of the internals could well too — the bigger battery in particular might replace the wireless charging coils of the HTC phone.
The U24 Pro launched to middling reviews, which may not inspire much confidence in Trump Mobile’s offering. Tech Advisor gave the phone two and a half stars out of five, calling it “hard to recommend over rivals,” while Notebookcheck declared it “modern and yet out of date.” Still, it fared surprisingly well in a JerryRigEverything teardown and durability test.
He noticed, however, that this didn’t appear to be the HTC of old, lacking the sapphire crystal HTC previously used on its displays and optical image stabilization on the front camera it once pioneered. The U24 Pro and other HTC phones released in the last few years share little consistent design language, and ship with near-stock Android software. Speculation has been rife that HTC isn’t in fact manufacturing the phones internally, but had commissioned an ODM — original design manufacturer — to produce the hardware. ODMs design and manufacture phones for other companies, usually to a set of specifications provided by the consumer-facing brands, and often retain ownership of the designs, allowing them to reuse and repurpose them for other clients. I asked HTC for clarification, but the company wouldn’t confirm whether the U24 Pro was made in-house or contracted out.
It’s certainly possible that Trump Mobile, or its manufacturing partner, is simply ripping off the design of a little-known HTC device. But I think the most likely answer here is a more mundane one: HTC probably worked with some unnamed ODM to design and manufacture the U24 Pro, and Trump Mobile just happened to work with the same company. That manufacturer may have either dug out its old designs for HTC when developing the T1 Phone, or perhaps gave new life to old, unused components from HTC’s production run. Without knowing the hypothetical ODM involved, it’s hard to say for sure. Trump Mobile has previously confirmed that it’s working with a partner or partners to manufacture its phones outside the US, before their “final assembly” in Miami, but executive Don Hendrickson wouldn’t tell me the name of its manufacturer or where it’s based. I reached out to the company again for comment on this story, and received no reply.
So no, I don’t think that HTC made the Trump phone. But it does look likely that it is based, more or less, on one of that company’s phones. It remains to be seen how the T1 Phone will differ in its details, but the fact that its origins seem so closely tied to an unpopular midranger from two years ago doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in the T1 Phone’s flagship credentials.
Got inside information on Trump Mobile or the Trump phone? Reach out securely from a personal device to [email protected], or see our How to Tip Us page.
[Notigroup Newsroom in collaboration with other media outlets, with information from the following sources]
