[Samsung Galaxy Nexus] charlescom:
Poor Quality Control Verizon LTE GNex on 3 Issues & Severe Variations among devices

First of all, if your first CDMA Verizon galaxy nexus worked fine from day one; good for you! I am writing this entire post because I want more Galaxy Nexus owners in the future to experience the same thing...saying "Mine is perfect!"

I definitely can agree with how amazing this phone is...it's just that I had to go through many of them to find the One and with 4 months of misery. The difference between the good and the bad devices are light and day....It is amazing how some of us have an awesome Galaxy Nexus and some of us have horrible Galaxy Nexus....after paying same amount of money.

During the past 4 months, I have gone through 2 New nexus (first one I bought, second one new replacement from the store after going through SIM card replacements and factory resets) and 2 factory refurbished nexus after I literally called every week at 611 to call both technical & customer representative (tier 2 & 3) due to :

(1) One-way-microphone cut off issue even when Data is turned off, our voice will start turning into a choppy, static robotic voice to the other party as soon as 5 seconds into a call on 10-50% of phone calls via bluetooth / speakerphone / regular phone earpiece.

(http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=24019)

"Personally believe to be both hardware & software related"

(2) 4G LTE dropping voice/data every 5-10mins especially when you transmit large amount of data (e.g. youtube videos or google music cloud storage) deeming this phone unusable unless you turn off 4G entirely even in -75dBm full signal zone stationary in San Francisco, CA as well as anywhere else.

(http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=24345) "Personally believe that this is entirely hardware issue because my last one is better already after one day of using it, we will see."

(3) Vertical Banding / Severe Pink Tint / Grainy screen / purple tinted screen / heavy yellow tint on either 55% bottom of the screen or 100% of the screen even at 80% brightness (http://xdaforums.com/showthread.php?t=1391509) (We are not trying to be picky, we know no sAMOLED screens are perfect. But some that I personally seen have been so poorly quality controlled that these panels shouldn't even have been used to see the light outside the factory.)

For the first 2 months when I talked to Verizon Wireless customer/technical service & samsung technical support (Samsung only says, they never heard about this issue and will say you have a bad antenna and they will replace it for you when you send the unit in for 3-4 weeks) they literally told me they are not aware of this issue and/or aware but it is a software issue which the update will resolve very soon. (The supposed update was first promised to come by end of Jan, then end of Feb, then end of March, then they started to admit that it is entirely upto Samsung and they have no control over this issue and at least some admit that there's technical bulletin written on this issue and this is a know issue.)

I know not all products are perfect. But I wish the Verizon Wireless was a little bit more up-front about these major defect and made official announcements that they are aware and is working on it (I say major because these issues are not like "Oh, my phone speaker is weak. or This phone is laggy time to time." but more like, I can't use this phone as a phone nor as a 4G LTE device.)

The bottom line is that there are so many variations among the nexus device that it's almost torturous to go through the "Bad Batches" if you were not lucky enough to find one that works within the first / second device. I almost expect 5-10% defected device from the production line in all electronics manufacturing process...But this is just ridiculous. We shouldn't try to defend VZW or Samsung because if we do, the next nexus will still come with poor quality control and let these phones out of the factory to the users hand. Even if it did happen, I want VZW to be more upfront about it then just caring for the massive amount of bad batches on an individual bases.

if you have any suggestions on how we users can do about preventing these from happening or at least minimize it, please share it with us.

My final wish is that One-Way-Microphone cut off issue is resolved in a timely fashion now...Because I really want to use this phone as a phone...