GoKawiilC. Scott Brown / Android Authority
In June 2025, I placed a $100 pre-order for a new device colloquially known as the “Trump Phone.” It took over a year, but I finally got what is officially known as the Trump Mobile T1. I have been putting it through its paces ever since.
Let’s address the elephant in the room right away. It would be incredibly easy, and perhaps expected, to get deeply political in a hands-on review like this. The phone prominently bears the last name of the sitting President of the United States, a figure who has spent years being undeniably divisive both here in the States and on the global stage. The President and his sons (who own and operate Trump Mobile) also carry a well-documented history of business controversies.
Even the T1 itself has a bizarre backstory, with early renders that looked like a gold iPhone morphing somehow into a gold Galaxy S25 Ultra, before finally arriving in reality as a rebranded HTC U24 Pro (yes, HTC still makes phones sometimes).
For this hands-on, though, I am going to completely ignore all that and talk about this device strictly for what it is: a 2026 Android smartphone with a $499 price tag. And while the T1 isn’t quite the absolute disaster I thought it would be, it is still an undeniably poor product that has no business being in your pocket in 2026.
Unboxing the Trump Phone
C. Scott Brown / Android Authority
The Trump Mobile T1 arrives in a surprisingly minimalist dark blue box adorned with the company’s logo and a sticker that reads “proudly assembled in the USA.” Exactly what that means in the context of a highly globalized consumer tech supply chain is anyone’s guess.
Inside the box, you get a clear TPU case that feels cheap and will almost certainly oxidize into an ugly brown or yellow hue within a few months. However, Trump Mobile does include a 33W charging brick in the box alongside a surprisingly premium, braided black-and-gold USB-C cable. In an era where most Android OEMs have banished chargers from their packaging, seeing a power brick included here is a nice surprise.
Unfortunately, any goodwill generated by the in-box contents completely evaporates the moment you pick up the phone. The T1 is supposedly gold, which makes sense given Donald Trump’s decades-long obsession with both the color and the material. However, the phone only genuinely looks like gold when you hold it under bright lights. In any normal scenario, it looks closer to a mustard yellow. See the photos throughout this article for proof.
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