The Trump phone has a 2x telephoto camera with optical zoom and has up to 30x digital zoom. Here are some samples to show off its zoom range. I took these four pictures in Sonoma on Sunday afternoon: the first is with 1x zoom, the second with 2x (with the phone's dedicated telephoto camera), the rest were digital zoom: with the third image at 5x and the fourth at 10x.

The zoom is passable, but it loses quality pretty quickly after 2x -- the detail on the last two pictures, in particular, looks soft and hazy.

I took this with the main camera at 1x.

Corinne Reichert/CNET

Taken with 2x telephoto camera.

Corinne Reichert/CNET

Here's the same scene captured at 5x digital zoom.

Corinne Reichert/CNET

And now here it is at 10x digital zoom.

Corinne Reichert/CNET

As a reminder, the T1 Trump phone has a 50-megapixel wide, an 8-megapixel ultrawide and a 50-megapixel 2x telephoto camera.

The Trump Mobile network map as it appears online.

Trump Mobile

One of the most common questions I've received over the past couple of days of testing this phone is how the reception is and whether it has good coverage.

Trump Mobile is a mobile virtual network operator, like Mint Mobile (which runs on the T-Mobile network, too). MVNOs don't have their own networks; instead, they buy wholesale coverage from the big carriers -- AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile here in the US.

When it launched in 2025, Trump Mobile's website noted that it was "powered" by Liberty Mobile Wireless, an MVNO based in Florida that runs on the T-Mobile network, so it has great coverage. It often has 5G in places my Verizon-connected Samsung Galaxy S23 Plus doesn't, which, since the speed-testing site Ookla named T-Mobile the best mobile network in the US after six months of testing.

Tea lights floating on water.

Corinne Reichert/CNET

The issues I had with the Trump phone's 50-megapixel main camera's shots in bright daylight seemed to diminish as the sun went down and the light faded. Its tendency to oversaturate images with color means it performs well in low light, picking up on details and some neon lighting at the party where I was taking photos.

If you zoom in really far, details get a little less sharp than you'd hope, though.

This image was taken at dusk. Notice the texture in the fabric on the table and how it differs from the glass candle holders.

Corinne Reichert/CNET

Patrick Holland/CNET

If you bought a Trump phone hoping to make a statement, I have some bad news for you: Not one person at a party of over 100 people I attended knew what it was and certainly not by sight. When showing others the phone, I had to direct them to look at the block-lettered "Trump Mobile" below the 11-striped American flag before they knew what it was. Even two Trump supporters I tracked down at the party hadn't heard of the phone before.

I got a lot of questions about the Trump Mobile network (it appears to piggyback off T-Mobile's 5G and 4G LTE coverage), and comments about the gold being the color of pee. One teenager said it looked cool, while another refused to touch it. One person asked a very polite but direct question about what exactly I was doing with a Trump phone -- but the overwhelming reaction was one of bemusement, a puzzled look and a brief question about it before moving on with their night.

Selfies are automatically filtered.

Corinne Reichert/CNET

I brought the Trump phone to a party on Saturday night (more on that later) and continued putting the cameras to the test.

On the left is the default Trump Mobile wallpaper. And on the right is a more lively and colorful wallpaper that replaces the default Trump Mobile image with a pic that I took at a fair.

Corinne Reichert/CNET

Yep, you can change the "Trump Mobile" navy blue wallpaper that the phone comes with! As a standard Android phone, you can customize the look, apps and more.

I changed the wallpaper to an image I took at the County Fair today, showing an emotional support pickle plush toy along with other prizes.

How will someone know that your photos are actually from the T1 Trump Mobile phone? There's a watermark added by default.

Patrick Holland/CNET

One of the curious discoveries I made when first setting up the T1 Trump Mobile phone was that it added a watermark to the photos I took. If you look at the bottom of the images above, there's a "T1" mark on the left corner and a date and timestamp on the right corner. In fairness to Trump Mobile, other Android phone-makers also have a watermark on by default, such as gaming phones from RedMagic. You can turn off the watermark in the camera app's settings. However, any photo that you took before turning the watermark off will still have it "burned" onto the image.

The Trump Mobile phone box simply says the phone was "Proudly assembled in the USA."

Corinne Reichert/CNET

When Trump Mobile launched in June 2025, the company announced that a Trump phone would be made in the US and launch in August 2025. But when it became obvious that domestic large-scale smartphone manufacturing would not be possible, Trump Mobile dropped the "made in the US" claim. 

Now, the site simply says it is "designed with American values in mind," an "American-proud design" and "shaped by American innovation."

While Trump Mobile has not said where the T1 phone is manufactured, executives told The Verge back in February that it's being made in a "favored nation" with "final assembly" in Florida. It's unclear what qualifies another nation as "favored" to handle most of the assembly of the T1 phone.

Nowhere on the phone, box, manual or packaging does it say where the phone was made. The box simply says, "Proudly assembled in the USA."

The photo on the left was taken with my Samsung phone, and on the right, the Trump phone. The image from the Trump phone is brighter, but the colors are skewed. Samsung's photo looks more lifelike.

I took both of these images from the same spot, just moments apart. The Galaxy S23 Plus image is on the left and the Trump phone photo on the right.

Corinne Reichert/CNET

This baby goat sitting in wood chips looked sharper on my 3-year-old Galaxy S23 Plus than on the T1 Trump mobile phone. Notice the texture of the goat's fur in both shots. Also, the edges of the wood chips and dried grass look softer and out of focus in the Trump phone image.

The phone cameras performed similarly when I took these pictures of a sand sculpture. The colors were slightly off in the Trump phone pic.

The apps that come preinstalled on the Trump phone include Truth Social and Doctegrity.

Corinne Reichert/CNET

I was pleasantly surprised by how little bloatware came on the Trump phone. Besides Android's various apps -- like Chrome, Drive, Gemini, Meet, Photos, Maps, YouTube and Calendar -- and the usual phone apps like calculator, camera, clock, phone and contacts, it came with just two other apps preinstalled: Trump's social media network Truth Social and telemedicine app Doctegrity. Access to Doctegrity is included in Trump Mobile subscriptions, though I'm not sure that I'd share too many personal details via an app.

There have been some questions about whether you can uninstall Truth Social, so I tried it. There's no uninstall option when you long-press on the app, as you get for Android apps on a Samsung phone, but when you long-press, then hit App info, there is an Uninstall button after that.

You can uninstall Truth Social from the Trump phone.

Corinne Reichert/CNET

The T1 Trump Mobile phone's benchmark put it in a corner compared to other cheap 2026 phones.

Patrick Holland/CNET

Benchmarks are just that. When I used the Trump phone, it was fine for everyday tasks like scrolling news feeds, loading webpages and playing YouTube videos. It's worth keeping in mind that most new phones have powerful processors as a hedge to make sure they can still perform well with the latest OS and apps five to seven years from now. So whatever processor is in the T1 phone will likely not be powerful enough to keep up with newer software in the coming years.

The Trump phone's specs are similar to those of the HTC U24 Pro (pictured).

HTC/Screenshot by CNET

According to the Trump Mobile website, the Trump phone has these specs: 

• 6.78-inch AMOLED screen
• 50-megapixel front-facing camera
• Rear cameras: 50-megapixel wide, 8-megapixel ultrawide and 50-megapixel 2x telephoto
• 5,000-mAh battery
• Unnamed Qualcomm Snapdragon chip

These specs are very similar to the HTC U24 Pro, a Taiwanese phone released in mid-2024 that costs around $450 to $500 for an unlocked model. It has:

• 6.78-inch AMOLED screen
• 50-megapixel front-facing camera
• Rear cameras: 50-megapixel wide, 8-megapixel ultrawide and 50-megapixel 2x telephoto
• 4,600-mAh battery
• Qualcomm Snapdragon 7 Gen 3 chipset

It's been suggested on Reddit and a community note on this X post that the Trump phone could be a modified version of T-Mobile's Revvl 7 Pro, which sold for $250 when it was launched in 2024. The Revvl 7 Pro has:

• 6.78-inch AMOLED display
• 8-megapixel front-facing camera
• Rear cameras: 50-megapixel wide, a 5-megapixel ultrawide, a 2-megapixel macro and a 2-megapixel depth camera
• 5,000-mAh battery
• Qualcomm Snapdragon 6 Gen 1 chipset

One other suggested contender is the 2022 Motorola Moto G, which has:

• 6.5-inch LCD display
• 3-megapixel front-facing camera
• Rear cameras: 50-megapixel wide, 2-megapixel macro lens and a 2-megapixel depth lens.
• 5,000-mAh battery
• MediaTek Helio G88 chipset

The T1 Trump Mobile phone comes with a case, a wall charger and even a gold and black braided USB-C cable.

Patrick Holland/CNET

When I unboxed the T1 Trump Mobile phone, I was surprised by how much was included with the gold handset. There was a case, a wall plug (you don't see that with most phones these days), documentation, a SIM card tool and a gold braided USB-C cable. Take a look at my unboxing and very first impressions of the Trump phone in this TikTok video.

Here is everything you get with the T1 phone from Trump Mobile, including a charger and a gold and black charging cable.

Patrick Holland/CNET

Using the charger and cable that came in the box, it took just under an hour to fully charge the Trump phone. Not too bad, depending on how much of a hurry you're in, but it's certainly longer than it takes my Samsung Galaxy S23 Plus to charge. For reference, the Trump phone has a 5,000-mAh battery, while my 3-year-old S23 Plus only has a 4,563-mAh capacity. But the Samsung phone supports 45-watt wired charging and the T1 Trump Mobile device has a 30-watt top-wired charging speed.

This might be the worst possible shade of gold.

Corinne Reichert/CNET

After an 80-minute round trip to pick up the Trump phone from my local FedEx after it was overnighted by my colleague Patrick Holland, my first thought on opening the box was: This is not the shade of matte gold I would have chosen for my flagship phone. It was kind of giving dehydrated pee vibes.

The phone's battery was dead on arrival, although Patrick notes that when he first took it out of the box, it was sitting at 53%, and he had it on nonstop during a live Q&A show and when he took photos and never charged it. So, this phone could potentially have a pretty decent battery life.

One of the only specs Trump Mobile has shared is that it has a 5,000-mAh battery. Paired with an efficient processor, likely the Qualcomm Snapdragon 7 Gen 3, it could last for a long time. I'll be running it through some battery tests in the coming days.

For now, I'm timing how long it takes to charge using the supplied 30-watt Trump phone charger.

The T1 Trump Mobile Phone runs on Android 15. But how many years of software and security updates will it receive?

Patrick Holland/CNET

One of the surprises we found when powering up the T1 phone for the first time is that it runs a close-to-stock version of Android 15. There isn't a "TrumpOS" software layer on top. Many phone makers will add their own software to a phone with Android as its foundation. Samsung has its One UI software, sometimes called a skin, but at its core, it's still Android. By contrast, Google, which makes Android, doesn't have that additional software layer on its Pixel phones.

Even though the Trump phone runs what appears to be a clean version of Android, it comes with the Doctegrity and Truth Social apps preinstalled. But how long is Trump Mobile committed to keeping the T1 phone's software up to date?

Samsung and Google each offer seven years of OS updates (think from Android 16 to 17) and seven years of security updates for the phones they sell -- and that includes phones like the $499 Pixel 10A. It's not clear how Trump Mobile will handle updates. If the T1 Trump Mobile phone is indeed based on the HTC U24 Pro 5G, that puts it at a disadvantage, since that HTC phone launched in 2024. Even if Trump Mobile were to match Motorola's 3-year commitment to OS and security updates for its budget phones, the T1's hardware might still limit its longevity.

Patrick Holland/CNET

As previously reported, we can confirm that the Trump phone features the wrong number of stripes on the American flag.

There are supposed to be 13 stripes representing the 13 original colonies of the United States, but the flag printed on the back of this golden phone has only 11.

The US flag does have the requisite 50 stars, however.