....except for the well documented Nexus antenna/reception issue which hasn't and won't be fixed. A deal breaker unless you are fortunate enough to live in a strong signal area. Rezound blows away Gnex in 4g.
That antenna/reception issue seems to be inconsistent across a lot of Nexus owners. I don't think it's a physical issue as I have not had any issues with the updated baseband radios. I don't get stronger signal, but I haven't had any dropped calls in places where I got dropped calls before. Also, the way that the Nexus reports its signal in dBm's is somewhat inaccurate. It only has 5 values for reporting signal with each value correlating to its respective signal bar; 120 dBm = 0 bars, 103 dBm = 1 bar, 93 dBm = 2 bars, 83 dBm = 3 bars and it tops out at 75 dBm for 4 (full) bars. I live right next to a cell tower and on my old Droid, it would get down to ~ 40 dBm when I was right next to the tower, but because the Nexus only reports in those 5 increments, the strongest signal it will report is 75 dBm. Same thing for dB's in between those increments; if you're actually picking up the tower at 88 dBm, then it may report it at 93 dBm (2 bars) instead of 83 dBm (3 bars).
This is opposed to most other phone OEMs that just tell you the actual signal strength so you can more accurately see what kind of signal you're getting. That makes it hard to compare signal strength to other phones since you're not seeing accurate readings on the Nexus. So one phone may say it's getting < 50 dBm, but the Nexus will only report 75 dBm because that's the strongest value it will display. I'm not sure why Samsung did it that way, but I guess it doesn't matter as long as you still have good service.
So I'll tell you this; as far as my experience goes with the Nexus, I have observed that it does show less reception in places as compared to my old OG Droid and my wifes Rezound, but I have yet to see a scenario where either of those phones have 4G/3G reception and my Nexus didn't or my Nexus seemed slower. So as far as actual service goes, the Nexus has been just as good at receiving data/calls as any other phone I or my Wife have had.
As a matter of fact, my wife is having an issue right now with her Rezound. We live in an "Extended coverage" area (Bluegrass cellular owns the towers and refuses to sell out to Verizon), so when my wife brought her phone home the first time, she didn't have an updated PRL and didn't have any sort of data connection (1X or 3G) through the carrier. So the next time she went into town where the Verizon store is (30 mins away), I told her to take it to the store and have them update the PRL. They did, but now when we're at home or anywhere else in the extended coverage area, she only pulls a 1X data signal, which is almost unusable and murders her battery life even more than it should. She's on the same PRL that my Nexus is on (15098 as of right now) and I
very rarely see a 1x signal on the Nexus; once or twice at work, I've seen it switch to 1x for a min, then back to 3G. So I tried taking the battery and SIM card out, re-inserting the SIM and battery (all in that order) while we were in town (still in extended coverage, but I thought I'd try it just for the hell of it) last night to see if it would fix it. Well now she doesn't even get 1x now despite still being on the same PRL. I'm not sure how that would mess with it, but it's becoming quite annoying. It seems to be affecting her being able to send/receive MMS messages too because she tried like 5 times to send me a pic yesterday (while on 1X) and it never made it out. She's didn't receive a pic from my moms AT&T dumb phone either while we were out, so we had to have her send it to my phone.
I'm sure it's an isolated incident though, at least I hope so. I hate driving an hour round trip just to troubleshoot/fix this phone. I'm about to have her go get a replacement just so we don't risk it being messed up still when we get home.
