We recently heard reports that some users were able to turn on support for LTE on their Nexus 4 devices.

LG has now confirmed that the phone ships with some chips that have LTE capabilities. But the phone itself is not designed to support the platform.

LG said that they had to use LTE capable chips to deliver the performance that Google wanted on this phone. But they had to remove some other hardware to keep the costs low.

Google is selling Nexus 4 at pretty amazing prices in the US market which has been made possible due to such cuts in hardware specifications.

It would not be able to enable LTE support on the device through software updates because it lack the required hardware like signal amplifier and filter.

Google Nexus 4 is selling well in the launch markets. In fact, it has been out of stock almost everywhere. Lack of LTE support was listed as one of the biggest shortcomings on this model but it has not stopped consumers from buying this phone.

We hope LTE and Google would eventually launch an LTE variant sometime next year with bigger storage capacity to give a bump to the phone sales once it stabilizes.