I have seen phenomenal pictures with the GNex camera, and I have seen horrendous pictures taken with the GNex camera. A lot of that comes down the user, lighting conditions, etc... All of his other "negatives" in that article have been refuted by dozens of others in comparable articles, so I;m not worried about that. The real negative, which seems to be universally agreed upon, is the 1080P video recording. That is definitely sub par from what I have seen. Who knows - maybe that is an issue that can be remedied with an OTA
You know, we had this same all-over-the-place performance with the camera when the Evo 3D first came out.
I found out that for whatever the real cause was, just resetting the phone made the bad pictures go away and the good ones come back.
That suggested to me that there was some sort of interaction with other stuff running (and with all of the image-related stuff I'm constantly running, no telling what it was).
So, that's a back-pocket tip - something to keep in your back pocket until needed - for when the Nexasaurus comes out and any bad photos happen.
Hope this will help.
BTW - it's also the reason I am constantly defending phones against bad reviews. Their goal is to meet a deadline and just push buttons. Ours is users helping users overcome or work around issues like this - and many of the negatives I've seen on reviews are just not real. IOW - we want to take good pictures and will work with new kit to see what's what. They just want to do A/B comparisons and declare race-horse winners.