It's not gold, it's not made in America, and it leaked my identity.

*Save 10% off a Cloth Pro Max*: https://snazzy.fm/yqu4U6

Follow Snazzy Labs on Twitter - https://twitter.com/snazzylabs

Follow me on Bluesky - https://snazzy.fm/UW

Follow me on Threads - https://snazzy.fm/XV

Follow me on Mastodon - https://snazzy.fm/NN

Follow me on Instagram - https://instagram.com/snazzyq

The Trump Mobile T1 finally shipped, and as one of the first paying customers in the world, I tore the $499 "Made in USA" Trump phone apart to find out what it really is. Spoiler: it's not the rebadged T-Mobile REVL Pro 5G everyone claimed — it's a gold HTC U24 Pro with a bigger battery, a broken in-display fingerprint sensor, and a Snapdragon 7 Gen 3. From pre-order emails landing in Gmail spam thanks to botched DMARC records, to paying for the $47.45 Trump Mobile 47 Plan over the phone, the entire buying experience was a disaster worthy of its own review. I also ran a full packet capture with PCAPdroid and Wireshark to test whether the Trump phone is spying on you — the answer might surprise you. Compared against the Samsung Galaxy S25 FE and iPhone 17e, this gold Android phone proves that patriotism and yellow paint don't make a $500 smartphone worth buying.

0:00 A phone I bet $100 against

1:30 Rescued from Gmail spam

3:42 Paying $500 over the phone

8:00 Amateur hour unboxing

11:13 Gold paint that isn't gold

14:03 Setup and a dead fingerprint sensor

18:53 Cloth Pro Max saves the day

19:30 What this phone really is

22:43 The teardown

26:34 Spying, verdicts, and goodbyes