Where is Trump’s phone? We’ll keep talking about it every week. We, as always, reached out to Trump to ask about the whereabouts of the phone, and we stopped receiving a response. This week, thanks to a reader tip, we think we’ve found the original phone on which the T1 is based.
A long time ago, when the Trump phone was just 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 tweaks, and a redesign later, I have a good guess: the HTC U24 Pro.
I didn’t see it myself. A reader first pointed out to me the similarities between the U24 Pro and the Trump phone I revealed a few weeks ago, which are numerous: a similarly angled body and curved display, a unique front sensor array, and broadly similar features, including oddities like a headphone jack and microSD card support.
Let’s make one thing clear at the top: I’m pretty sure HTC isn’t secretly manufacturing Trump phones. Sohaib Ahmed, the company’s global director of PR, told me: “HTC does not design or manufacture phones for third parties.” But that doesn’t rule out another company having a role in the design or manufacturing of both phones, and given how similar they look, I doubt that’s actually what happened.
U24 Pro is a unique phone in itself. It launched in 2024 for €549 (about $600 at the time), and in some corners it was heralded as a return from the dead for HTC, despite the fact that it followed the U23 Pro the year before, and had a series of smaller releases targeting the Asian market. HTC, once one of the major players in the Android phone industry, has weakened significantly since selling a large portion of its smartphone business to Google for $1.1 billion in 2017.
Both the T1 phone and the U24 Pro have a slightly asymmetric angular frame, extending to a point on each edge, and a heavily curved screen on the front. I can’t think of, or find, another phone that has exactly the same shape – even small things like the position of the antenna lines around the power and volume button lines. What’s even more obvious is the set of sensors at the top of each phone. The U24 Pro splits its speaker grille, notification LEDs, and proximity sensor into three parts, resulting in an unusual design with a long bar, a short point for the LEDs, and then a second short bar at the point where the display meets the top of the phone. What appears to be a similar sensor design can clearly be seen on the Trump phone I was shown, though I can’t confirm if the sensors themselves are the same, or whether the T1 phone will even have a notification LED.
Other details are subtle. It’s hard to say exactly from the glimpse I got of the Trump phone, but with the top frame it certainly looks like both the headphone jack and microphone are in the same position as the HTC device. Even the presence of a headphone jack is evidence of the phone’s connection, considering how rare this 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 the base 512GB storage.
While the rear cameras look completely different, which seems to debunk my theory, look again: the U24 Pro’s cameras are split into a pair, with a third lens facing downwards. The new Trump phone sets all its cameras in one mount, but they are unevenly spaced, with a large gap between the second and third lenses. These cameras may look completely different on the surface, but I suspect that underneath you will find that they are identical. And what we know about the specs matches up, too: Trump Mobile told me its phone will have 50-megapixel sensors for both main and selfie cameras, and my glimpse of its camera UI showed an ultrawide and 2x zoom option — all of which you’ll find on the U24 Pro.
Considering that both phones are essentially the same, does the U24 Pro tell us anything else about what to expect from the T1? It’s powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 7 Gen 3, which matches what I was told about the Snapdragon 7-series chip in the Trump phone. The U24 Pro features a 6.8-inch OLED display, 60W wired charging and even wireless charging support, and an IP67 rating for dust and water protection. However, there’s reason to be cautious when reading too much into the spec sheet: the U24 Pro is released with a 4,600mAh battery, which is smaller than the 5,000mAh capacity I’m told the Trump phone will have. If that specification is different, other elements of the internals may well be as well – notably the larger battery could replace the HTC phone’s wireless charging coils.
The U24 Pro launched to mediocre reviews, which may not inspire much confidence in Trump Mobile’s offering. technical advisor Gave the phone two and a half stars out of five and called it “hard to recommend against rivals”. notebookcheck Declared it “modern and yet old”. Still, it performed surprisingly well in the JerryRigEverything teardown and durability tests.
However, he observed that it did not look like an old-fashioned HTC, as its display lacked the sapphire crystal HTC used earlier and the optical image stabilization on the front camera that it once pioneered. The U24 Pro and other HTC phones released over the past few years don’t have a uniform design language, and come with near-stock Android software. There is speculation that HTC is not actually manufacturing the phone internally, but has instead hired an ODM – Original Design Manufacturer – to produce the hardware. ODMs design and manufacture phones for other companies, usually according to a set of specifications provided by consumer-facing brands, and often retain ownership of the designs, allowing them to be reused and repurposed for other customers. I asked HTC for clarification, but the company would not confirm whether the U24 Pro was built in-house or contracted.
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 more general: HTC probably worked with some unnamed ODM to design and manufacture the U24 Pro, and Trump Mobile worked with the same company. That manufacturer may have either dug up its old designs for HTC when developing the T1 phone, or perhaps given new life to old, unused components from HTC’s production. Without knowing the hypothetical ODM involved, it’s hard to say for sure. Trump Mobile has previously confirmed that it is working with a partner or partners to manufacture its phone outside the US, ahead of its “final assembly” in Miami, but executive Don Hendrickson would not tell me the name of its manufacturer or where it is located. I again reached out to the company for comment on this story, but did not receive a response.
So no, I don’t think HTC made a Trump phone. But it seems to be more or less based on some phone from that company. 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 inspire confidence in the T1 phone’s flagship credentials.
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