I fought this far too long. Generally I’m a guy who doesn’t like fiddling with root, aftermarket bootloaders and non-stock Android ROMs. At the same time I carry around 2 phones, an iPhone 5 and a Motorola Droid RAZR Maxx (Spyder or XT912 if you prefer). Because I’m spoiled by the iPhone for part of my life, waiting for simple things like search results or even the keyboard to slide up for even milliseconds can be infuriating. Android phones are like Windows computers, they seem polished and usable on day one, but as time goes on they somehow manage to get crufted up and slower than molasses. So once again I find myself dicking with my phone to make it useful in the way I want it.

The process is easier than ever on this phone, and SafeStrap allows you to do it all without ever compromising your stock Android. It’s nice to have that safety net. I got LiquidSmooth 3.0 (KitKat) going without a hitch. The phone was faster, smoother, better than ever in every way. Unfortunately I got the message in the title whenever trying to send or receive MMS It is a dealbreaker. After fiddling with apns-conf.xml, build.prop, loading 3rd party messaging apps, and spending countless hours flashing, reflashing etc. I found the only solution ended up backing out to JellyBean, I used Eclipse which was fine.

Determined yesterday I returned to my KitKat endeavors. There are some features in it I just don’t want to be without. I spent the same countless hours doing the same things. There are hundreds of people on the Internet with apparently the same problem, but no silver-bullet sort of solution pops up. For me that silver bullet was as simple as changing my “Preferred network type” setting from Global to CDMA+LTE/EVDO. That was it!!! I even tried it on a couple of different ROMs just to make sure.

Hopefully someone else finds this and saves themselves the same amount of time troubleshooting that I did. It would make sense for me to revisit the countless threads on different forums scattered across the net and put my findings there, unfortunately it’s just not going to happen. Hopefully this post finds it way to the top of the Google heap.