The Trump phone probably won't be built in America (and may never be)

Yahoo

11 hours ago

President Trump's family is launching a smartphone it's calling the T1 Phone alongside its own mobile service dubbed Trump Mobile. One of the biggest selling points of the device, which will be priced at $499, is that it will be made in America.
But the announcement, made by Trump's sons Eric and Donald Jr. on Monday, leaves a lot of unanswered questions, chief among them: how the company plans to manufacture a smartphone in America in the first place.
According to Trump Mobile, the T1 Phone will be available in September, but experts are throwing cold water on the idea that the device can be built in the US by that time or even within the coming years.
IDC analyst Francisco Jeronimo says the T1 will likely be based on an existing phone manufactured overseas.
'Smartphones are not like you decide to print a few more T-shirts or a few [types of] other merchandise,' Jeronimo told Yahoo Finance. 'They are complex products. So first, I doubt they are manufacturing or building phones themselves.'
'This looks like a typical white label product that you go to change and buy it from someone, put the logo on top, but that's it,' he said.
Counterpoint Research analyst Blake Przesmicki offered a similar assessment of the T1 phone, saying in an email that it 'is likely that this device will be initially produced by a Chinese [original device manufacturer].'
Todd Weaver, developer of Purism's Liberty Phone, a privacy-centric smartphone that uses US-built electronics, said it took his company years to set up the facilities and source the necessary components to ensure the phone's processing and communications features all come from America.
'There's a lot of challenges, many years, to even get to the scale that we're at, which is only thousands of phones and not hundreds of thousands of phones,' Weaver told Yahoo Finance.
In an interview with conservative YouTube personality Benny Johnson, Eric Trump held up what he claimed was a golden Trump phone, though it struck more than a passing resemblance to an iPhone.
Trump later added that 'eventually all the phones can be built in the United States of America.'
Yahoo Finance reached out to Trump Mobile for clarification on the phone's origins but didn't receive a response by deadline.
The Trump Mobile site lists the T1 Phone as sporting a 6.8-inch AMOLED display and 256GB of storage. The company also oddly lists its RAM as 12GB of storage. RAM and storage are different forms of memory.
The phone will also come with a triple lens, set up with a 50MP main camera, a 2MP depth sensor, and a 2MP macro lens. Earlier reports indicated that the company initially claimed the phone would include a 5,000mAh camera, which is actually a measure of battery life, not a camera specification.
The Google Android-powered T1 also includes a 3.5mm headphone jack and USB-C port.
Weaver claims those specs roughly line up with a smartphone called the Revvl 7, which is currently sold by T-Mobile's Metro brand and is itself a version of the Chinese-made Wingtech Revvl 7.
The Trump administration has made building devices in America a key part of its economic policy. Part of that effort included placing upwards of 145% tariffs on products built in China, including smartphones, laptops, and desktops, though Trump eventually provided exemptions for those devices.
More recently, Trump has taken aim at Apple's Tim Cook, criticizing the CEO for moving manufacturing from China to other countries such as India. Last month, the president threatened to place a 25% tariff on Apple's iPhone, as well as Samsung phones, if the companies don't move manufacturing to the US.
Industry analysts say building smartphones in the US would be a Herculean task, requiring companies to construct manufacturing facilities while also training the appropriate workforce, an effort that would take several years to complete. And September is coming quickly.
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