The long-delayed golden Trump Phone looks nothing like the advertised image, has a smaller screen than promised, and its color leaves a lot to be desired, according to one of the few people to lay eyes on a real one.
The $500 Trump Phone has now been delivered to tech media for review, one year after it was announced and nine months after its hard launch to cash-rich MAGA diehards.
Not only is the screen smaller than expected, but the phone is also not made in America as promised, Patrick Holland, the managing editor of tech site CNET, told CNN. Rather, Holland added, the packaging says the phone is “designed with American values in mind.”
Holland reviewed the Trump Phone on CNN on Monday after spending the day testing it—and the news was not good for customers.
Holland says the actual product looks “nothing like the original image” from last year, which he said resembled an “altered iPhone 16 pro.”
The tech expert ripped into the phone’s selling point, criticizing the “gold” coloring in honor of Trump’s favorite thing.
“Sometimes it looks like those gold coins that Scrooge McDuck would jump into for DuckTales,” Holland said of the Disney character bathing in his riches.
“Other times, it’s got a mustard vibe to it, and yet other times, it kind of looks like a urine sample.”
The CNET unboxing video also reveals that the American flag etched into the phone has 11 stripes, instead of 13. It comes with an old-school headphone jack and has Truth Social pre-installed. The camera also automatically filters selfies.
Holland said he would not recommend the phone to customers due to the unknown technical construction of the $500 item.
“We don‘t know what the processor is in the phone. We don‘t know what the software and security updates will be,” Holland said
He also said he has a “big worry” about whether the Trump Phone will actually ship to people who paid for it.
“While a couple of us in the media do have it, I can‘t find many cases of actual customers who put their money down to order the phone with the phone.”
The Daily Beast has contacted the Trump Organization for comment.
According to Holland, the box of the Trump Phone says it was “assembled in the USA.”
“They could be being literal here, and it could be that they put the phone in the box and that the box was assembled in the USA,” Holland said.
He said after reviewing the phone, CNET found that the performance of the processor and the graphics card was similar to that of the Taiwanese phone HTC U24 Pro 5G.
“That’s not a bad phone by any means, but it’s certainly not made in the USA.”
Trump Mobile said it “expedited” the phones to media ahead of customers, according to CNN.
The CEO of Trump Mobile, Pat O’Brien, told CNN in a statement, “The technology business is more difficult than some may realize,” and that due to “incredibly high demand,” the orders were being fulfilled as “quickly as possible.”
Holland criticized the delay in giving customers what they paid for.
“If you did order this phone, it doesn‘t matter what your political persuasion is, you shouldn‘t be ripped off.”
A CNET reporter who spent the weekend trialing the phone praised the safety case it comes in, but questioned the Trump Mobile network coverage, the battery life, and the zoom function.
After showing the phone to people, Corinne Reichert said she got “comments about the gold being the color of pee. One teenager said it looked cool, while another refused to touch it.”
She revealed the phone comes with an “automatically filtered selfie camera,” noting that the function had been “so popular” with everyone she showed it to.
