bmoses

just a mini update had this 3rd one for over a week now, so far its much much better! there are still some times when it lags scrolling or switching/loading apps but overall its not bad and actually i would say better than my original flex, it would randomly lag scrolling and switching apps too. it still gets warm when doing some tasks, but not hear as burning hot as my first one did. the thing that seems to make it the warmest is using data over LTE. like if i were to update some apps over LTE it would start to get warm. battery life has been good but not quite as good as my original flex, smaller battery and higher resolution screen will do that though i've been getting at least 3 hours or more of SOT from 100% down to about 10%. days where i use it a lot i get 10 or so hours out of a charge with 3 to 3.5 hours SOT. that number goes up or down depending on how much standby time is in there. standby time is fantastic and it barely uses any battery (assuming some rouge app isn't eating it up). probably the only downside i've found is it appears that B41 performance is actually worse than my original Flex, but on the flip side B25 performance appears to be better. There are several spots where i used to hold onto B41, but couldn't hold onto B25 where i now lose B41 and keep a good B25 connection when compared to the original flex. i think part of it has to do with the B41 antenna placement. looking at the graphic in the OP it shows it along the lower third of the device, which is where most people are holding their phone and i think this is what is affecting performance. for example, at my daughters dance i'm within range of a B41 tower, i was checking out signal strength and noticed i wasn't connecting to B41 very much where my original flex would stay on B41 in the parking lot. After doing some testing i found if i held my phone along the sides so i wasn't covering the back i would connect to B41 at around -110, as soon as i held my hand normally, which covers the bottom half of the phone, i would immediately lose B41 and drop down to B25. sometimes i would catch it at -120 or less before it dropped to B25. in B41 mature markets this may not be as big of an issues if you have B41 signals coming from all directions. in my market where there are only 3 B41 towers so far you are only ever connected to 1 of them, so any signal blockage results in dropped B41 sounds like there is an update released for overseas versions that is fixing the lag and issues, hopefully it will be coming to us soon to really make this phone shine

had some surprising battery life last night! it was done charging before i went to bed so i decided to unplug it to see how it did standby overnight with battery usage. i'll just let the screenshot do the talking

3rd time's a charm?!?!?!!?!? stopped back at the sprint store i got the original flex 2 from today to find out my options. The only way i could "reset" my upgrade would be to do a return on the flex 2 and swap to a sprint phone i already own, which i don't have, so that left me with swapping devices until this saturday to find a good one to keep for the next year, which the store was willing to do. so i went ahead and had them initiate another exchange since the 2nd one was having the issue with the horizontal lines in the screen. i did compare to their display units first and one had no issues and the other had some lines but not as bad as mine. they powered on the 3rd one and we checked out the display, it was perfect, so good there. when i left the store i went ahead and factory reset again and then started restoring my backup. so far its good on the heat, was barely warm by the time the backup was done restoring. now i'll just have to keep an eye on it over the next couple days to make sure it doesn't overheat like the first one. the girl that was helping me said that i was the first one that she had heard of having problems.... the guy that originally sold me the flex 2 was there and while she was in the back checking on something i went over and talked with him since he had said he was going to get one. I wanted to check and see if he was having problems with his or not, he hadn't been able to get one yet so he wasn't using one. however he did mention that they sold 4 or 5 on launch day and every single on of those had been returned so far.... one other guy had returned 2. overall its a great phone, they just need some quality control or something to get these bad devices out of the pool so people stop getting them.

Another day of use down and it's still working better than my old one. It does get hot sometimes and do the screen brightness reducing due to temp but it cools down so much quicker it's not an issue. I did stop in another sprint store to compare displays to see if I was seeing things or not. One of the display units had the lines a little bit and the other didn't have them at all. Its not a huge issue as I only notice them while doing certain things. I'm just struggling with keeping this one that is working fine otherwise or trying for a different one and chance getting one that overheats again.....

Ok so here is my update..... I would say I definitely had a bad phone with the other one. However this new on does still get hot with use, but not near as often or for as long as the other one. So to start off I went ahead and did a factory reset before I did anything else just in case. I then proceeded to restore my backup up. When doing this on the old phone it would get hot and stay hot throughout the entire restore. This one barely got warm and not until it was almost done. The hottest the new one got was when I was downloading all the app updates. I would say it got as hot as my old one, but the good part is that after I was done doing updates I continued to browse the web and switch between apps and stuff and it actually cooled off. The old one would stay hot until I stopped using it for at least 15 minutes or more. This one cooled off after a few minutes. The only thing I'm unsure of, and I don't know if I'm just being extra sensitive because of the issues, is I think there might be some horizontal lines going through the screen on this one. I only notice them on certain screens and if I take off auto brightness and turn it all the way up they go away. So I might go back to a store to at least compare to the demo and see if it's on them. I don't remember seeing them on the old one I had. So my conclusion is there are a bad batch of them out there, but even with a good one there will be times where it gets hot. Its just a matter of it cooling off or staying hot all the time.

Got my device swapped, will post back later if it's any better. So far it's looking good. But I'll post more later when I have time.

Thanks! I'm on vacation right now and I'm not sure if I can switch my phone out in any store or if I have to go back to the one I bought it in. So it might not be until next week that I can make the switch and see if it's any better.

How about heat issues? Does yours get significantly hot doing mundane things? I could understand heat playing games or benchmarks, but just browsing the web should cause the amount of heat I'm feeling.

So are you having issues similar to what I'm describing? Just trying to figure out if I have a bad one or not.

Power down phone and hold power and volume down until it says starting recovery mode. From there you can wipe cache.

Ok so for those of you still following this..... Lag issues today appeared to be fixed. Every once in awhile a little noticable lag but much improved from the other day. I did have one weird scenario happen. I took my phone out to take a picture, opened the camera app, had to position my kid, and when I looked back down the screen was off. Tried to unlock it and nothing, wouldn't come back on. Holding the power button for 10+ seconds did nothing to reset the phone. I had just checked the battery level and had 91st least 40% left when this happened. We got our to the car and I plugged it into the car charger and the screen came on saying it was charging and I had 44% battery. I then turned the phone on and everything appeared to be fine. It did download the Sprint stuff again, like it thought it was turning on for the first time but all my stuff was still there. I went ahead and did another factory reset just in case. So not sure what that was about.... So besides the hopefully fixed lag issue I'm definitely having heat issues. Doing the simplest thing like browsing the internet in chrome for about 20 minutes will cause the phone to heat up to the point where it feels significantly hot in my hands. Plus when it does that it lowers my screen brightness and won't let me turn it up due to the temperature. So I'm going to try reading it in and see where that gets me and go from there. Hopefully I just got a ddud because everything else about the phone is amazing. Especially the camera. So much better than the original flex!

Ok so I did some searching last night and while there are not a lot of user reports yet there was a mixed bag of comments. Some people claimed to have no issues at all. Others had experiences close to mine. A couple people mentioned returning theirs and getting a new one that performed better, and some others said doing a factory reset helped theirs. Since I can't return mine right now I opted for a factory reset. I ran through and reset and wiped cache several times last night and then restored all my data. The phone was very hot from doing all this but after doing some tests switching apps and stuff that was extremely laggy yesterday, worked much better after the reset. Every once in a while there was a small delay in an app opening but not near as bad as yesterday. I'll keep and eye on it throughout the day today and report back later if it's still working better. Depending on how the rest of the week goes I may or may not go ahead and return it next week in case I got a bad one. I'm not sure if I can swap back to my old phone to reset my yearly upgrade since I had to turn it back in and it's probably long gone, to wait for a different phone, or if I'm stuck with this one for the next year....

So..... This phone doesn't like heat..... At all.... We took a road trip today and I had my phone in my car holder and it was running maps for navigation, spotify, torque, and signal check pro. It was also in the sun since we were traveling south. It was lagging like crazy! Switching between apps was laggy and trying to do airplane mode in signal check would take forever and most of the time not even work..... So hopefully there is something they can do with the software to help it out because it's not looking good....

2nd day battery stats http://i1102.photobucket.com/albums/g442/bradmoses/flex2/Screenshot_2015-03-15-19-28-58.png http://i1102.photobucket.com/albums/g442/bradmoses/flex2/Screenshot_2015-03-15-19-29-08.png http://i1102.photobucket.com/albums/g442/bradmoses/flex2/Screenshot_2015-03-15-19-29-29.png http://i1102.photobucket.com/albums/g442/bradmoses/flex2/Screenshot_2015-03-15-19-29-38.png

here are the battery stats for today. they did get thrown off a little bit because i had to hook my phone up to my computer while i was rooting it for a few minutes, plus it restarted several times and looks like it threw off some of the stats. anyway, here is what the battery info screen shows.

oh, and if anyone wants root on their Flex 2 i just found this guide http://highonandroid.com/android-smartphones/how-to-root-lg-g-flex-2-g2-g3-on-lollipop/ and went through it and it worked! thank goodness i have airplane mode in signal check pro back!!!!!!

my furthest 1x800 connection was 62 miles. it was when they first started bring up 1x800 around here, an interstate tower to the north of me got it and i connected to it in my house. i was running the higher priority PRL at the time since i was hunting for 1x800 signals.

small update, worked on getting everything setup last night and had a birthday party today so haven't got to play with it a ton. I was using it a bunch to take pictures and record both UHD and HD videos today. It did get hot while doing the UHD video recording and at one point the video started stuttering. I bumped it down to 1080p HD and it did fine after that. When it was hot it was slowly taking my display brightness down too. I had it at 100% auto and the lowest it got down to was 70% auto and it wouldn't let me set it higher until it cooled off. i'll post final battery stats from today later tonight once it gets down lower. so far i'm at 36% left, its been on batter for 5h 36 min. screen on time of 1 hour 33 min at 39% and android OS at 15% with CPU total at 44 min and keep awake at 1 hour 26 min. signal wise i would say its about the same as my flex. hard to compare though since i had to turn my flex back in so i'm trying to go off of memory. B25 might be 1-2 DB better, i was hoping B41 would be better based on the FCC OET test results, but so far B41 appears to be the same. oh, and if anyone wants their MSL for their phone just follow parts 1 and 2 of this guide here http://forum.xda-developers.com/showpost.php?p=47324060 worked perfect for me. you can go one step further and flash a custom PRL with it too if you want. so far i love it though, i do miss the 6" screen from the flex, but everything else about this phone is way better than the flex, especially the camera! no more grainy photos for this guy

Got mine!!!! Still getting it setup but so far I'm loving it! Still wish it was a 6" screen but I will get used to it I'll post some more after I've had some time with it.

thanks for the awesome review! can't wait to get mine on Friday!!!!!

wasn't sure where to put this so i'll just throw it in here so more people see it. last fall 3 of my lines got new phones on easy pay, they did the sprint buy back on their phones for a bill credit. last month the bill credit finally showed up. my normal bill is $445/mo and i had buyback credits of $728 and am setup on auto pay. So last month the credit covered my bill and nothing happened with auto pay because it said i had a negative balance of $283. now this month rolls around and i'm showing an alert on my account that says i'm past due and i am unable to make any changes to my services online until i make a payment. After a painful conversation with sprint chat support i come to find out that my buyback credits only apply to my service charges and NOT to any phone installments (from easy pay). so i technically have a past due amount of $129 which was all the phone payments from last month. no where in the system did it alert me that i would still need to pay the phone installments and being on auto pay it did not realize this either and so it didn't charge me anything since it showed i had a negative balance. so just wanted to let everyone know that if you get any kind of bill credit or buyback credits that would cover your entire monthly bill and you have an easy pay phone installment on your account that you still need to pay that, even if the system doesn't tell you to, otherwise your account will be flagged as past due.

I got that email too, 4 of my 9 lines were eligible for it. The only problem is the way the email reads its only good on the listed phones and none of the 4 lines eligible would want one of those phones.

i don't know if it has anything to do with CCA/RRPP or not, but i've been seeing more and more PCI numbers show up in my neighboring cell list that don't belong to sprint. unfortunately all the people i know on other carriers have samsung phones (that don't yet show PCI) so i can't use them to track down the PCI. it used to be i would see 1 here or 1 there and now its almost everywhere i go i'm seeing new PCI that i hadn't seen before. my main 2 guesses are that its USCC that i'm seeing and it has to do with this going live hopefully soon, or verizon has been installing XLTE around here and as more towers get that i'm somehow seeing the PCI from their towers.

in the des moines metro and ames its good outside of those areas sprint doesn't have a big presence so you are mostly roaming and no LTE. in the metro areas there are very few spots i lose LTE anymore and speeds are good, not amazing and the top, but good enough to do whatever i need to do. on average i get 3-6 meg down on either B25 or B26. sometimes i'll hit 10, 15, or 20 meg down but in the places i frequent its usually around the 4 to 5 meg mark. sprint only has 3 towers with B41 here (unlike lincoln that has a lot ) and when i hit one of those then its 30 to 50 meg down. calls and texting are never issues around here. if this stuff is becoming interesting to you, you should consider donating to the site. thats how it stays running is from donations from people, plus it gets you access to the maps so you can see where the towers are and what technology is installed in them. in IA and NE we have a pretty active community that keeps track of the upgrades on the towers. you do have to get to premier level to see B41 and B26 info, but your initial donation will get you access to maps on where the towers are and which ones at least have LTE.

there is a possibility for expansion to SD based on the report he did here http://s4gru.com/index.php?/blog/1/entry-382-sprint-planning-large-network-expansion-adding-9000-new-lte-sites-nationwide/