Report-out
A roadtrip thru rural flatlands and hill-country with the Nexus
I've driven this route down many times and it takes me thru several areas in rural OH,IN, KY, and TN with a wide variety of Verizon coverages. There is a large dead area I drive thru that always rendered the Original Droid useless. The dead region was so large that if used for navigation, I would drive "off the map". It was not just a lack of data, but a total lack of signal. Not even voice. This was true as of late August 2011...my last drive thru the area prior to this trip.
Nexus and Signal
-The dead zone was NOT A PROBLEM FOR THE NEXUS! Not only did I maintain navigation ability at all times, I never lost voice and only lost data for a few minutes. Never long enough to empty the map buffer.
-Vast majority of the route had usable 3G.
-Indianapolis had good 4G as I drove by on I-65 and I-69.
Nexus is one hard worker
The Nexus was always doing at least double duty as navigator and media server. Most of the time it was doing triple: nav, music, & torrent.
At one point the Galaxy Nexus was simultaneously giving spoken turn-by-turn nav, streaming music thru bluetooth, downloading 4 movies, and wirelessly tethering internet to both an iPod touch and a laptop PC!
While the sheer amount of data moving thru the poor thing was enough to occasionally cause the music to skip briefly and the data was split into a near-useless streams, the phone never overheated, rebooted, or FC'd any app. Every function remained completely stable and usable.
Nexus for the long haul
At one point I managed to go 27 hours without a charge. CDMA only, but LTE was all I sacrificed during that stretch. Obviously, this was essentially all idling. A few texts and time-checks during that, but not else. Regular use was worry free and without restriction thanks to one extra battery and external charger. Even with the heaviest phone use the charger could easily refuel a spent battery before I needed to swap.
Device details
LTE Nexus
GummyNex 0.3.0
Apex 1.35 kernel using the default voltage
4.0.3 baseband
Nova Launcher Beta 5
No other mods or tweaks.