Before I bought it, the Galaxy Nexus was my holy grail among cell phones. Now, over two years later, I am all too glad to get rid of it. In the past I have replaced phones in order to get new features or because they were becoming sluggish, but this is the first time I have needed to get rid of a phone because it was no longer providing the functions it was intended for. To say I am disappointed is an understatement; if there is any sort of silver lining, it would be the lessons I’ve learned from dealing with this device.
My list of gripes is longer than I anticipated, so I’m just going to list them out. Some are specific to the Verizon version of the phone, while others are not.
Verizon Specific Issues
Google Wallet is disabled. Verizon disabled the feature, out of fear that it would compete with their own homebrewed wireless payment solution. In the end, I’m not sure that anything came of Verizon’s product. Meanwhile Google Wallet is still accepted by retailers, and there have been at least a few times when I really would have liked to use it. This is the typical kind of shortsighted thickheadedness which characterizes wireless carriers in the US, and once again it did no one any good.
With a Nexus device, all updates are supposed to come directly from Google. But Verizon insists on all devices running on their network to go through a Verizon QA process, so their version of the Galaxy Nexus never got OS updates on time. The delays were often measured in months, not weeks, and VZW was not keen on providing clear information to users about the status of their testing. In the case of the phone’s final update to Android 4.3, it never happened at all. Having experienced Android 4.3, I can say that it has some marked improvements over 4.2 (which I still consider one of the weirdest updates in the history of the OS), and I think the GNEX would have greatly benefitted from it. Unfortunately, Verizon deemed the phone too old to support by the time the update was ready, which was as absurd as it was frustrating.
There wasn’t much in the way of Verizon bloatware on the phone - their My Verizon Mobile is the only one I can think of that was on there for sure. It still defeats the purposes of the “clean, pure Android” experience offered by the Nexus line.
Non Verizon Specific Issues
The biggest, most glaring, and longest running flaw is the GPS. It will take anywhere from one to ten minutes for it to grab a signal and pinpoint my location. When you are in a situation where you need directions right away, this is a very huge problem. It caused me a lot of grief, and at times, even embarrassment.
Almost as frustrating as the GPS flaw itself was the cause of it - or rather, the lack of cause. The issue does not seem specific to any version of the phone, meaning the blame has to be with either Google or Samsung. Neither company ever stepped up and took any blame. To this day I have yet to determine the root cause of the problem (I did discover a lot of articles claiming to know how to fix it, but none of those fixes ever worked for me).
The hardware is kind of ugly. The plastic backing which protects the batter feels cheap and flimsy, and the overall coloring somehow makes grey look even more dull than usual. Thankfully the front looks nice, which is all I can see when the phone is wrapped up in a case.
The Galaxy Nexus has awful battery life. I was lucky enough to have an extended battery, which ensured I only had to recharge once a day. With the standard battery, this was only possible if I avoided using any features which relied on the GPS. In other words, a phone which was once very fast and full of new features didn’t have enough juice out of the box to consistently take advantage of them all. That’s a problem no matter how you slice it.
The camera is a joke. The zoom completely destroys the quality of photos, and the instant shutter feature that it originally shipped with went away in a later OS update. Potato camera indeed.
On my old Motorola Droid, the headphone jack started having problems after about a year, during which I used said jack on a daily basis, and abused the hell out of it. The headphone jack on my Galaxy Nexus broke down in the same manner, in the same amount of time, but was hardly ever used.
All phones degrade in performance over time, including this one. But I’d argue that the Galaxy Nexus started showing its age far earlier than it should have. The phone debuted running Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, and it did so beautifully. The followup to ICS, 4.1 Jelly Bean, didn’t make any drastic changes, and it too ran fine. But then the Jelly Bean 4.2 point update came along, and suddenly the phone lost its mind.
One moment it ran fine, the next it locked up or froze. Occasionally it rebooted for no apparent reason. The last update to the Chrome browser caused webpages to turn blank while scrolling through them. And on a recent roadtrip I found that turn by turn directions would just shut off without me realizing it (and when they did work, the phone got too hot to touch).
I can’t think of a good reason why a minor update like 4.2 would perform so much more poorly than 4.1, but it did, and by the time it became an issue Google was already busy with their next Nexus phone, so who knows if they were even concerned. Or maybe they couldn’t be concerned, because ….
The Galaxy Nexus uses a CPU manufactured by Texas Instruments. TI is no longer in the business of making mobile phone chips, and thus would not provide further support for their existing CPU’s. If not for this, it is possible the phone would have been supported for longer (at least for the non Verizon version). In this case, I think it was simply dealt a bad hand, but it is still unfortunate.
In the last six or so months of using the phone, I began missing and dropping a lot of calls. More than I ever have on any phone or network. I still don’t know the cause.
What I Learned
Apple became the kings of the smartphone market by making devices that look great and run smoothly. I say “devices” because I’m including the iPhone C, which proves that a plastic phone doesn’t have to look like crap, and older hardware doesn’t have to run poorly.
Samsung, on the other hand, became kings of the smartphone market by … well, I’m not really sure how they did it. Marketing I guess. The Galaxy Nexus hardware just feel cheap, and judging by what I’ve read from other Android users, their other models don’t fare any better. Additional research suggests that GPS and phone signal issues are endemic to Samsung as a whole. Market leader or not, I don’t trust them to build a quality smartphone any more.
Verizon has the best network in the country, but everything else about them stinks. They should have never agreed to support a Nexus phone, and I hope they never try to pull a marketing stunt like this again.
Google doesn’t know how to properly market the Nexus line. I think most people equate Nexus with being the best Android powered devices on the market. But this isn’t actually true. The line’s primary purpose is to give developers a platform to test the latest and greatest version of Android on. The secondary purpose is to provide this platform at a price that even the smallest developer team can afford. Both of these are noble goals, but they are met at the expense of just about everything else. Between owning the Galaxy Nexus and both iterations of the Nexus 7 tablet, I have discovered that Nexus devices cannot be relied on to provide durable hardware (as evidenced by defective chassis of my first N7), strong battery life (as evidenced by my 2nd generation N7), or good looks (as evidenced by every Nexus device except the Nexus 4). In other words, they don’t provide many of the features that consumers (even consumers who happen to be developers) look for in phones and tablets they intend to use as their daily drivers.
In other words, the Android world still doesn’t have a true equivalent to the iPhone. You can get the latest, greatest OS, without any skins or BS, or you can have a quality piece of hardware, but not both. If that’s a damning statement for Android, then so be it. My Holy Grail turned out to be a paper cup. I’m tired of playing apologist for Google and the hardware manufacturers.