I have bought LG Optimus 4X HD also nick named “P880” after reading great reviews of it everywhere on the net.

To be honest with you, the phone is great and it is one of the best “quad-core” phone available in the android phone market as of this date of this article. You can read the entire spec of this phone at gsm arena website but there are problems with this phone ….

The first problem I noticed was poor signal in the house when compared to my other Samsung phones which can pickup good signal in my home. This could be also because of my service provider AT&T poor signal in my neighborhood.

But the show stopping problem is that it’s unforgiving battery drain, from full charge at 100% – 0% in 4 hours without even using the phone during bed time or moderate use of the phone during the day which about in ~3hours or less.  Tried to return the phone but found out that I would need to pay 15-20% restocking fee, then I started researching on the web on possible solution to this problem. Came across many article but no trick worked. As this is a relatively a new phone in the market, there is not that many forum or articles which talks about this problem when compared to other comparable phones that are in the market relatively longer.

Anyway, I stumbled upon a forum where a user described that “all LG Optimus model phones suffers from the same GSM/CDMA auto prl cell standby bug which affects its battery life! But there is no word about this on LG official website. So skeptically, I followed the instructions which is as follows:

1. Dial *#*#4636#*#* which will take you to the phone’s “Testing Menu”
2. Click “Phone Information” Section, scroll down till you see “Set preferred network type: and a drop down box which is originally selected to “GSM/CDMA auto (PRL)”. Click on that drop down to select “GSM Only”
3. Go back two times to exit out.
4. (Optional) Restart the phone to check to see that value you selected in #2 sticks after reboot. It is set for good in my case after the reboot.

After doing the above, there is drastic increase in battery life!! Now the battery comes the whole day with moderate use. BUT at what cost? In the above step #2, what you are doing is to ask your phone to do only 2G connections not 3G connection. Which means a) slower data download/upload b) you may be even paying already for 3G/HSDPA but instead of using it you are downgrading yourself voluntarily to 2G – that’s a shame.

Unless battery technology improves in the near future you will be buying phone after phone and run into the same old problem “poor battery life!”

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Note: If you have AT&T branded smart phones like Samsung Infuse 4g, you are going to have tough luck downgrading to 2G data speed (to improve battery life -oh really!) as mentioned above steps as I found that the value “GSM Only” that you select in the dropdown does not stick and it would revert back to  “GSM/CDMA auto (PRL)” ! You may want to do the following for that type of phones:

1. Dial *#2263#
2. You will get band selection menu
3. Press Menu Softkey>Select>Enter “3” (for GSM Band)

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