Quinn Nelson of Snazzy Labs is one of the first people to get his hands on the Trump Mobile T1 Phone — and one of the most entertaining to review it. The video below is quite long, but it goes into great detail examining the hardware and software of the device.
The video starts with a 2-minute explanation of how email spam works, because the Trump Mobile team had serious difficulties sending emails that don’t immediately get flagged by Gmail. And if you’re wondering whether you should buy one, the next 4 minutes of the video deal with all the difficulties Quinn had just trying to purchase the phone he pre-ordered. Apparently, you need a “47 Opinion” with Trump Mobile to actually order the phone.
Snazzy Labs’ examination confirms the picture from last week: the Trump Mobile T1 Phone is an HTC U24 Pro (a mid-ranger from 2024) with cosmetic changes and one meaningful upgrade — a larger battery.
Here’s the thing though — the phone isn’t actually that bad. It has a 6.8″ 120Hz OLED display (1,080 x 2,346px) and is powered by the Snapdragon 7 Gen 3. The battery has 5,000mAh capacity and supports 30W charging. That’s the biggest difference from the HTC phone, which has a smaller but faster-charging 4,600mAh battery with 60W charging. The T1/U24 has a notification LED on the front, a 3.5mm headphone jack on top, and a microSD slot. It’s configured with 12GB of RAM and 512GB of storage, which is pretty good for a $500 phone in the age of the RAM crisis.
But if the first few minutes of the video didn’t scare you off, then note that the optical fingerprint reader was broken — though that could be an issue specific to that particular unit. Additionally, Google Messages appeared quite buggy, so neither the software nor the hardware seems to be in great shape.
Here’s the big question though — does the Trump Mobile T1 Phone spy on you? We won’t spoil that — click play on the video below to find out.
