HTC Thunderbolt: Turn 4G LTE off, cure battery life problems

The HTC Thunderbolt on Verizon has been hitting the news for the wrong reasons recently. After the handset seemed to take an age to be finally released, many users have been complaining about the terrible battery life. Today we have a way for owners to turn 4G LTE off, and hopefully curing battery problems.

Many of you have been contacting us complaining about the battery life on the Thunderbolt, and you were not sure about paying $50 for the extended battery which was being offered.

Another problem was after installing the battery your phone case is now unusable. But an article over at Android Central has a method for turning off LTE on the handset.

The person who posted the information warns of the risks of turning off LTE, but has mentioned that in doing so has seen his battery life increasing to over eight hours on a full charge.

Even though this looks to cure battery life problems with the HTC Thunderbolt, wasn’t having a handset with 4G capability the main reason many people purchased it in the first place?

Use the link above if you want to try the option yourself and let us know how you get on with it.

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Bnk

I bought the thunderbolt and already did that it made barely any difference at all, definitely going to return it been having loads of other problems 2. it's not worth my time
dave

Yea even without the 4g running battery last less than 4 hours..what a joke.
Grick

I've noticed a huge difference after going into settings > Applications > Manage Apps > Running, and forcing basically everything I don't need to be running to stop. Bluetooth also kills the battery faster than a mother, so I only turn it on if I know I'm going to be using it immediately.
Katherine

Agreed. Battery life is only about 6h with minimal use (a couple of 20 min phone calls, briefly checking emails and surfing web for about 20-30 min)! Standby is about 18 hours, which is also miserable given that I sometimes forget about the phone and don't recharge. I have a Droid X also and will go back to that phone. It does everything the Thunderbolt does for about double the battery life (still not amazing but better than the HTC).
aceboogie

Turning 4G off is not necessary the problem is not actually using the 4G network it is when the system is searching between 4g and 3g the simple installation of juice defender will solve this problem as where I'm only being this problem when my tb is in standby mode. Juice defender kills all 3 and 4G radio activity without stopping txts or calls until the phone is unlocked, once unlocked the device should search and lock on a tower anything auto sync will come in very fast and not much battery is drained. I bought an extended battery before trying this app and when I say even with extremely heavy use (when I say extreme I mean using the internet any chance I got just to use it , txting, calling and all auto sync on n all) I couldn't kill the battery for 2 days.
aceboogie

o yea and I forgot one more thing s good app killer is always helpful just make sure u don't have any auto sync apps on auto kill as this will cause a continuse opening and closing of the app causing battery life to be drained fast
Daniel D.

I created an app that will make the process of disabling it much easier! No more typing in that long code! Please check it out and let me know what you think:
https://market.android.com/details?id=com.ds410.F…
Dee

I returned the Thunderbolt just a week after receiving it, I was impressed with the concept of the phone as it was a very nice device. I moved to Verizon simply to experience 4g lte, and now I'm moving back to t mobile to experience hspa+ again. No point of paying for something you can' use at it's full potential, and Verizon's 3g is so slow that deactivating 4g defeats the purpose. At any rate I'm getting the G2X Wednesday, and in Atlanta I can guarantee about 5-8 megs down, fast is fast, and at the moment no phone at retail is faster.