T-Mobile's Samsung GALAXY Note II could receive update to turn on LTE support

Earlier Tuesday, T-Mobile CTO Neville Ray said that Las Vegas would be the first city to be covered by a T-Mobile LTE signal. And that, naturally, got some T-Mobile customers wondering about the fate of their Samsung GALAXY Note II which currently runs on the carrier's HSPA+ pipeline. You might remember back in October, we told you that the 5.5 inch phablet has the Qualcomm 9215M chipset which supports both LTE and HSPA+. At the time, we told you that it was T-Mobile's intentions to allow the device to connect to LTE signals once T-Mobile started offering LTE service.

Tonight, Ray was back on stage to talk about T-Mobile's LTE plans and mentioned that an OTA firmware update for the Samsung GALAXY Note II might be in the works. The update would turn on the LTE radio inside the phablet and let those T-Mobile customers lucky enough to be in an LTE covered area to use the service. While the executive didn't mention when this update would come, he did say that some AT&T LTE phones will work on the T-Mobile LTE network.

One thing that the CTO didn't mention was whether the upcoming version of the Apple iPhone for T-Mobile would support LTE. The most current model of Apple's iconic smartphone, the Apple iPhone 5, is the first in the series to be LTE enabled.

source: PCMag