Owners of the Samsung Galaxy Nexus Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich smartphone awaiting the official fix for the handset's spontaneous volume reduction bug may want to avail themselves of an unofficial fix in the meantime.

Courtesy of one of the founders of the MoDaCo forum, the release, which hasn't been sanctioned by either Google or Samsung, nonetheless purports to be their code, but still in the internal testing phase.

The patch requires a handset with an unlocked bootloader. Put the handset into bootloader mode and then a set of scripts for Windows, Mac and Linux operating systems handles the rest.

The sound glitch sees the handset drop the audio volume of its own accord. The phone goes suddenly silent, without warning. Not every handset appears to be affected, but the consensus is that the bug only makes its presence felt when the Galaxy Nexus is operating in the 900MHz band for 2G communications.

MoDaCo is also hosting test code that ups the brightness of the screen when the backlight is set to auto. It also has a kit for rooting the device through a tweaked boot image. ®