Reviewer gets his hands on Trump Mobile’s $499 phone and what he finds is ‘absolutely brutal’
Donald Trump promised the Americans a “patriotic alternative to big tech when he unveiled the Smartphone T1 by June 2025, however, the product would have did not live up to expectations.
Wednesday October 28 Zack Nelsona popular YouTuber known for gadget teardowns and durability testing, put the $499 handset through its paces.
Highlights
Zack Nelson compared Trump’s $499 T1 phone with the HTC U24 Pro, discovering striking similarities in their designs and internal components.
The handset’s flawed American flag design also led Nelson to question Trump’s patriotic branding.
His political commentary resonated with viewers, with some calling the criticism refreshing.
He also compared it to a Taiwanese model released in 2024, saying the president’s offer seemed “extremely suspect.”
“Phone so badly you remember the Epstein files,” one user joked.
A popular tech critic tested Trump’s T1 phone and claimed the president misled consumers.
Nelson’s T1 review video had garnered 9 million views as of this writing.
Early on, the reviewer placed the handset next to the HTC U24 Pro, a phone he already owned.
He pointed out that the two devices matched in terms of overall size, the contours of their angled metal frames, placement of the power and volume buttons, notification lights, USB port, headphone jack, and microSD card slot.
Scratch testing yielded similar results, with the first visible marks appearing at level six on a Mohs hardness peak, a tool used to assess a material’s scratch resistance.
More pronounced grooves appeared at level seven.
Nelson then opened both handsets, revealing that their interiors were also identical, down to the number and location of screws, motherboard and battery.
The most striking moment, however, came when the reviewer swapped motherboards between the two devices.
Both phones booted immediately, further suggesting that they were built on the same platform and come from the same manufacturer.
Nelson also questioned the president’s claims of patriotism by pointing out a design flaw in T1’s American flag.
The flag printed on the phone had fewer stripes than the real American flag.
Pointing out the discrepancy, Nelson sarcastically suggested that the Trump Mobile brand could explain the missing stripes, “one red, one white.”
He then raised another concern about the image, citing Section 8(i) of Title 4 of the United States Code, which states that the American flag “should never be used for advertising purposes in any manner.”
Nelson, meanwhile, didn’t shy away from calling attention to Trump’s past legal troubles and alleged lies during the video.
Zack Nelson took aim at Trump over democracy, Epstein files and his felony convictions
Nelson’s first personal blow against Trump came as he explained why it took him so long to review the device.
The figure refers to a New York jury finding Trump guilty of 34 counts of falsifying business records in May 2024.
Later, during the scratch test, Nelson noted that T1 scored at levels six and seven, joking that those numbers were among Trump’s favorite numbers.
The critic then broadened his criticism to Trump’s political record, accusing him of making promises without keeping them. He argued that the president was still complaining about America’s problems after several hundred days in office, although he promised to solve them from day one.
“We need to start judging the guy by his actions and not his promises,” Nelson said.
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