Well, who didn’t see this coming? We knew that LTE did work on the Nexus 4, but only on band 4. Which means it would work on very few AT&T LTE markets (I believe the count was about 5 markets?) and on T-Mobile’s LTE whenever that gets up and running. Well now, that LTE switch no longer works on the Nexus 4. Which isn’t surprising since the FCC didn’t clear it as an LTE device. Which means either the Nexus 4 would have to get clearance from the FCC or Google would have to disable the LTE radio some other way.
According to AnandTech, the dormant LTE radio is no longer working in Android 4.2.2. Brian Klug from AnandTech did some tests, including the way to activate LTE on the Nexus 4, he found that choosing “LTE Only” setting would automatically revert to the “WCDMA Preferred” settings. So you can either stay on Android 4.2.1 with all those bugs and keep LTE connectivity, or upgrade to Android 4.2.2 and lose LTE and all the bugs. It’s a tough decision, especially if you were really using that LTE connection full time.
How many of you were actually using the LTE setting on the Nexus 4 full time anyways? Couldn’t have been to many of you. It’ll be interesting to see if a developer is able to find a way around this and get LTE working again on the Nexus 4. Since it’s just a software change, it shouldn’t be to hard, right? So if you were using LTE on your Nexus 4, you may want to hold off on updating your Nexus 4 to Android 4.2.2. You can also take a look at the change log and see if any features are in Android 4.2.2 that you need right away.
So we knew this was going to happen, but LTE is now gone from the Nexus 4. Which for most of us, it won’t even matter since we never used it. At least in the US, since it worked in only a few markets for AT&T and T-Mobile doesn’t have their LTE network up yet. But I understand quite a few of our Canadian friends were able to use it. We’ll keep our fingers crossed, and eyes open for a work around. With the big developer community that the Nexus 4 has, it’s bound to happen.