The Galaxy Nexus originally launched with 32 GB of storage, and also a LTE chips on Verizon, which pushed its price to $300. Now Verizon is about to release a 16 GB version, which means the price might also drop as much as $100 (if they decide to cut some from the pricing of the LTE chip, too).
It’s a bit unfortunate that Verizon has started pushing for $300 as the standard price for high-end smartphones lately, in part because of the LTE chip, but also because of the higher storage. I’m hoping that once these prices come down, they will once again promote the high-end price as $199, but I’m afraid that new technologies will allow them to push for the same $299 price at the high-end. The only to stop that is the customers stop buying the $300 devices, and go for the $200 ones instead.
Around the end of March, Verizon should also make available the LG Lucid, and the HTC Incredible 3 4G. It seems HTC is looking to prolong some of their older phone brands, and squeeze all that marketing value out of them. Hopefully, some of these phones include new chips like the Tegra 3 or the dual core S4, which should be significantly more powerful.