Earlier today, we reported that some British owners of Galaxy Nexuses were voicing concerns about the volume spontaneously going to zero; at the time, we'd hoped that it was a software issue, but a new video has us worried that there might be something deeper involved. A YouTuber has uploaded a brief video of a Galaxy Nexus in bootloader mode that appears to be cycling through the menu itself when another phone is brought near — in bootloader mode, the menu is actuated by way of the volume rocker, so there's your connection. The phone next to the Galaxy is allegedly connected to a 900MHz 2G network, which appears to be the band where the phones are having the problem. It's way too early to speculate whether Google and Samsung will be able to patch this up with an over-the-air firmware update alone, but the fact that this can be reproduced simply by holding another phone nearby — all the way up in the lightweight bootloader mode, no less — is cause for alarm.
Users have discovered that they can temporarily stop the issue by locking the phone into 3G mode, but depending on where you live and where you travel, that may not be an option. The silver lining for North Americans is that there's no evidence yet to suggest that this bug (assuming it's a real bug) will affect either the CDMA / LTE variant or the GSM variant when operating on US and Canadian bands; we certainly haven't seen anything like this on our review unit, but we'll be keeping an eye on it as it develops.
Thanks, oscillik!