From the Galaxy Nexus to Droid Razr

Posted by littlekid on September 2, 2012 06:35 am 8

So I signed on with Verizon about 4 months ago, and at that time, I was torn between the galaxy nexus and the htc rezound. I asked all my friends, and then I believe I made a post here, and every one raved about how great the gnex was.

So I bought it on amazon for $80 at the time, and I had it for a week before hating it. ICS was great, don't get me wrong, but the antenna in that phone is downright garbage. I was lucky if I would see two bars in most places I went, (-100-110db avg.) While my fiance's iPhone 4s would see 4-5 bars, and be at (-65-75db) in the same spots.

So I was told to try turning on the LTE, which I did, and that made things 40x worse. Now, instead of a bad signal, my phone would randomly drop signals all together, and then take anywhere from 1-5 minutes to re-access the network, and sometimes would require me to reboot it it to reconnect.

Fast forward living with those issues for a bit, and I decided I wanted Jellybean when it was announced.

So I go through the rooting process, find a suitable rom, and Install it on my phone. It was great at first, Very responsive, I loved google now, etc.

Then, a week or two goes by, I make sure to keep the rom up-to-date, and all of a sudden I'm lucky if my battery can make it till 3 in the afternoon after charging all night. I assume it's the battery, so I order another one, and that battery has the exact same problem.

So I go to load a new rom, and now my phone will no longer be recognized by my PC, So I'm thinking great, I'm stuck on this rom, and can't fix it. I tried a bunch of different things to attempt to fix it, and it ended up needed a factory reset to get it to recognize.

My first thought was that this rom/kernel sucks. So I tried CM10, then a few others, but they all had the same issues.

I went back to stock ics, and that fixed my battery issue, but the antenna still sucks. Well, I heard that the Jellybean pre-release came out, so I re-unlocked the phone, and went to install that. Again, couldn't get it to recognize. After fighting with various cables and settings for an hour, I finally got jellybean installed. The battery life was fine, and the 4g didn't drop as much, but it still couldn't pick up a signal to save a life.

So I went down to the store, ended up adding a line, and getting the Droid Razr, and I couldn't be happier. - Even with motorola's skin, that phone is smooth, responsive, decent battery, and good lte.

Also, from what I understand, most of these issues only happen on the verizon version.

Thanks for letting me rant here.

tl;dr - gnex lte/signal and battery blows, moved to droid razr.