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.
It’s a little hard to make out in this screenshot, but the Trump phone shares the sharply angled edges of the HTC U24 Pro. Screenshot: The Verge and Screenshot: JerryRigEverything
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.
Both phones have near-identical sets of speakers and sensors about the front selfie camera, with headphone jack and microphone visible behind them on the top edges. Screenshot: The Verge and Screenshot: JerryRigEverything
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.
... continue reading