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How to Turn off 4G LTE on the Galaxy Nexus to Improve Battery Life

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The Galaxy Nexus on Verizon is an amazing phone, but if you live on the edge of 4G LTE coverage, or need extra battery life, you may want to turn off 4G LTE to save battery life.

I know that turning off the high speed connection to save battery life isn’t the best solution, but sometimes you have to choose between speed and battery life.

Read: Galaxy Nexus Review

I only turn this off when I am in an area with very poor coverage, where the phone switches between 3G and 4G LTE too often,  but you use this tip anytime you need longer battery life.

How to Turn off 4G LTE on the Galaxy Nexus

Thankfully, turning off 4G on the Galaxy Nexus is very easy, and doesn’t require root or any special app.

1.  Pull Down your notification bar.

Turn off 4G LTE on Galaxy nexus Step 1

2.  Tap on the Settings icon.
3.  Under Wireless and Networks, tap More.

Turn off 4G LTE on Galaxy nexus Step 2

4.  Scroll down to Mobile networks and tap it.

Turn off 4G LTE on Galaxy nexus Step 3

5.  Tap on Network modes.

Turn off 4G LTE on Galaxy nexus Step 4

6.  When prompted,  tap on CDMA.

This will force your phone to use 3G connectivity until you follow these steps again and choose LTE / CDMA.

These steps won’t interfere with your data plan or billing,  and you can change between these modes as often as you like.

Galaxy Nexus Batteries

Galaxy Nexus Batteries -- You'll Need More Than One.

I keep my phone on the 4G LTE option for the most part,  but when I have very poor coverage this trip of makes it possible to keep connected and enjoy better battery life on the Galaxy Nexus.

6 Comments

6 Comments

  1. web promo

    12/19/2011 at 6:52 am

    This is a nice post in an interesting line of content.Thanks for sharing this article.

  2. Adam Truelove

    12/19/2011 at 11:36 am

    I don’t live in an area with 4G and shut off my 4G radio the minute I got my Nexus and still get pretty not-great battery life.  I’d rather have inferior battery life on an amazing device (Nexus) than amazing battery life on an inferior device (iPhone).

    • JohnPA2006

      05/18/2012 at 6:05 am

      I agree with you, you can always top off the battery during the day, or buy an extended battery, or buy a second standard battery.
      Having a nice big beautiful screen is always worth it.

  3. obama

    12/29/2011 at 2:41 am

    everybody stand back while i feed this troll

  4. Bill Kilpatrick

    05/20/2012 at 5:03 pm

    The Galaxy Nexus is a candy store of cool features, but nobody needs all of them running at the same time. There is nothing radical about toggling to 3G when 4G coverage is spotty. In fact, that’s just the beginning.

    4G is only useful if you’re going online. It does nothing for phone calls or text messages. If you’re in standby, there’s no reason to tax your battery life. Toggle back to 3G when you don’t need 4G.

    And that goes for NFC and GPS. If you don’t need it, don’t run it.

    Next to the 4G LTE radio, as well as NFC and GPS, the next biggest waste of battery life is the constant updating that keeps waking your phone up while it’s asleep. This is a death of a thousand cuts. Toggle off the Enable Data switch to put off the updates to when you’re actually accessing the internet. Doing so will have an amazing impact on battery life.

    Just for kicks, I took the display to 50% brightness and changed my wallpaper to black. I also moved desktop apps to other windows so that I’m only showing my clock when my display lights up. For a time, I browed using Blackl (Google Black) but I’ve already gotten such dramatic results – even with the skinny 1850 mAH battery – that it feels stupid to keep looking for places to cut back.

    It does help to run the battery to zero and then charge it all the way to 100%. I’ve done it. But these other tweaks – particularly the 3G and Data Enabled toggling – work so well that it’s a bit of overkill.

    Another tweak is to use WI-FI when it’s available.

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