As far as I can tell there is no external way to tell if the blade grips are the new ones. My buddy got a new blade with the 3bb grips and I had the older one with the 2 bb grips. Even a close inspection of the 2 shows no difference. You would really need to pull the grips apart to see if it has 3 ball bearings or not.

I do know that the original blade that was released had the servos and 4-in-1 with solid black plastic. If the servos and the 4-in-1 are see thru then you have one of the newer batches. They upgraded the servos with the newer faster ones and apparently there was some upgrade to the 4-in-1 as well. The blade grip upgrade came after this though so this is not a definitive check unfortunatly.

Unfortunatly without tearing it apart there is no definitive way to tell other than checking the manual that I've found.

Good luck