We only learned about this little bit of detail last week after the official launch of the BlackBerry Z10 in the Philippines. Apparently, there are two different variants of the BlackBerry Z10 that were released in the Philippines — one has LTE and the other only has 3G/HSPA+.
We got our first loaner unit about 3 weeks ago and we reported that we were getting speeds of up to 28Mbps with LTE enabled. That unit came from Globe and was running on a Qualcomm MSM8960 Snapdragon 1.5GHz dual-core Krait and Adreno 225 GPU.
During the media launch last week, we were also given another unit by BlackBerry (it was an honorarium to all of the hosts of @GeekyNights for live-streaming the event) and turns out the units did not have LTE at all.
This gave us the hint that another totally different variant was also being distributed in the Philippines — the one with Texas Instruments OMAP 4470 1.5GHz and PowerVR SGX 544 GPU. It uses an STE M5730 modem that supports HSPA+ and not LTE.
So we asked around why this is so and got some answers from various reliable sources:
- The units distributed directly by BlackBerry in the Philippines is the non-LTE version (TI OMAP 4470) which is what you will see and get in official retail stores.
- Globe separately/directly ordered their own units that came with the LTE modem (Qualcomm MSM8960 Snapdragon).
- Smart and Sun Cellular ordered their own batch but those were the non-LTE versions (TI OMAP).
The BlackBerry Z10 is actually free on Smart All-In Plan 1800 (30 months) and Sun is also offering the same at Plan 1799 with unli-data. Globe also offers the BB Z10 free on Plan 1799 (30 months or with Php4,800 cash-out for 24 months).
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