Unveiled by Orange UK as San Francisco, it went on sale on 21 September 2010, with a white variant released later.

[4] The ZTE Blade II V880+ was released in March 2012 with Qualcomm Snapdragon MSM7227A 1 GHz processor and Android 2.3 Gingerbread.

[5] The Blade III was released in September 2012 with a 4.0 inch screen, 4 GB storage, a 1600 mAh Li-ion battery and Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich.

[29] In the annual handset opinion survey of The Best non-htc Device of 2010, organised by xda-developers forum, the ZTE Blade won a total of 24.66% votes, placing it first among the 32 handsets including Samsung Galaxy S and Google's flagship phone Nexus S, placing them on the second and third position right behind ZTE Blade, as judged by forum users.

[30] Various websites, mainly MoDaCo and xda-developers, have created a very large modifications scene around the Blade.