Back at the announcement of the Galaxy S III, many people were quick to note that Samsung disclaimed the availability of the Exynos quad-core processor powering the beast as contingent on certain issues of geography. And then we learned that, for reals, the US versions of the Galaxy S III would be shipping with Snapdragon S4 dual-cores onboard - the MSM8960 chipset, to be precise.

And that included T-Mobile's version, which many speculated (myself included) might be the only Exynos-packing Galaxy S III to make its way to the US of A. We thought this might be a possibility because T-Mobile doesn't have an LTE network, and won't have one that's really in place in any practical sense for another year plus. They're even further behind than Sprint.

So, it understandably upset a lot of T-Mobile customers when the news came down that the exact same piece of hardware everyone else was getting would be headed to America's pinkest carrier, as well. And the big question was why?

We have the answer, officially, from Samsung: Exynos 4212's radio doesn't support HSPA+ 42Mbps. We got this information straight from a Samsung representative with knowledge on the matter specifically, and they were emphatic that this was the reason for T-Mobile getting the dual-core Snapdragon S4 version of the Galaxy S III. It's very likely, actually, that T-Mobile specifically requested this specification - it's been pushing its HSPA+ network speeds stupidly hard in recent marketing campaigns.

So, there you have it. T-Mobile didn't want its Galaxy S III to be limited to a paltry 21Mbps network connection, so it decided it was better to give up Exynos and go with a Snapdragon instead. Sure, other minor considerations might have gone into this, but the answer we got was in no uncertain terms: it was all about the megabits.