Tegra 4, the troubled child of Nvidia’s mobile business, has yet to start shipping in actual devices. More than two quarters late, delayed to Q3 2013 now it finally found its way to a ZTE headset, dubbed the U988S.

The phone pictured in red comes with a 5-inch screen, has a Tegra 4 processor rocking at 1.8GHz, 2GB of RAM, 13-megapixel, 2-megapixel front camera, microSD slot and at 9mm it looks pretty thin.

It should be coming with Android 4.2.1 as well as some other color rather than red. There is a big chance that the phone doesn’t come with LTE support simply as ZTE is not so big in USA market and Europe and China market don’t really care that much about this faster way of internet, plus Tegra 4 needs an Icera 500 chipset to have LTE. As far as we know Icera 500 is under validation right now and would just increase the cost of this headset, something that ZTE would not want.

Tegra 4 looks like a decent competitor to the recently launched Snapdragon 800, and it looks like these two SoCs will fight for the performance crown in 2013. Feature wise Snapdragon has LTE out of the box which is a clear win and there are some indications that it might hold its battery a bit longer, but we will have to wait to see this to believe.

Let’s hope that we will get our hands on Tegra 4 based phones soon, as the venerable HTC One X+ is the best Nvidia based phone on the market at the moment, and it’s almost a year old.