It is official, the Galaxy Nexus as offered by Verizon Wireless in the United States is no more.
Just over a year ago, Android faithful in the United States were scratching our collective head over how to get the newest phone in the Nexus family if we weren’t or didn’t desire to be locked into a Verizon Wireless contract. As it turns out, this was only the beginning as far as the troubles for the Verizon Galaxy Nexus.
This was to be a Nexus device, yet it was locked down. An exclusive contract with Verizon made it impossible for all that wanted to have the device to be able to use it without changing carriers. Part of having a Nexus device is that they are carrier unlocked and branded only by Google and the manufacturer making the Nexus a near perfect world phone. This one was not. Google wanted LTE and what they ended up getting was a power struggle with Verizon with everything from rights to sell the phone, to access to the NFC radios which were locked down as such that only Verizon’s proprietary payment software could access the radio.
As it goes with most any handset that is connected to a carrier, updates were slow. This is not normally too big of a problem, but this was a Nexus device with core values of having the fastest updates. Now those of us that unlocked our bootloaders could have the updates, usually within a couple of days at the most. It is the principle of the matter though, that had Nexus fans angry about the whole ordeal with Verizon. Besides the update issues, the radios in this thing were horrible, and would always be. Many contributed this and the lack of a latest update to be hand-in-hand and that maybe the reason for the lack of a 4.2 update is that they are working on the radios and would release the new version of android when they had solved the radio issues. Now though, it is hard not to think that maybe Verizon is just through with the Galaxy Nexus.
Now it is Over:
The Samsung Galaxy Nexus, even the Verizon version, has been one of the most important and most desirable handsets to have over the past year. Almost everyone that I know in the Android community has had one and many carried it all the way up until the Nexus 4 was released and some past that point. It will be a mainstay amongst Android hackers, developers, and connoisseurs alike for some time. Android lovers will keep the device around because the device was so important to Android and the Nexus program as a whole. So to the Verizon Galaxy Nexus: a worthy adversary of any battery thrown at you, a hero and trooper through any fall, and with an LTE radio that helped define your existence and kept our data coming in at breakneck speeds.
We Solute you, and bid thee farewell.