More on the ongoing saga of the Verizon Nexus 7 LTE issue. Back in September when Google released the Nexus 7 LTE, we knew it would work on T-Mobile, AT&T and Verizon. Well we knew it would work for sure on T-Mobile and AT&T since you basically just put a SIM card in and voila it works. But Verizon is a bit different because of the fact they are partially a CDMA network. So they can’t activate the Nexus 7 LTE on their network, but you can use an existing SIM card in your Nexus 7 LTE and it works fine. Basically what Verizon told us is that the device needs to be certified, and they expected it to be certified within another week or two. It’s now nearly 2 months later.
This afternoon, Verizon released a statement about the certification for the Nexus 7 LTE, and basically saying that Google and ASUS had decided to wait for KitKat to roll out to certify for use on the Verizon network and says “system issues” with Android 4.3 is to blame. Here’s the full statement from Verizon:
During the certification process for the Nexus 7, Google, Asus and Verizon uncovered a systems issue that required Google and Asus to undertake additional work with the Jelly Bean OS running on the device. Since Google was about to launch its new Kit Kat OS, rather than undertake this work, Google and Asus asked Verizon to suspend its certification process until Google’s new OS was available on the Nexus 7.
So it looks like Verizon users that wanted the Nexus 7 LTE are going to have to wait a bit longer. Since we don’t know when the Nexus 7 is getting the OTA from Google, although I expect it to be real soon since the Google Play Editions are supposed to get it in about a week. Then we have to wait for Verizon to go ahead and redo the certification again. By the time the Nexus 7 LTE gets certified, we’ll be looking at the Nexus 7 (2014).