Well folks I've been doing all the research, trying to make the best decision like many of you and after as much "testing" as I can do I've finally given up on having this phone and now must consider my options. I'm in my 14 day window coming over from AT&T and with the switch I'm activating 4 smartphones with Verizon. I was hoping to make this my first Android phone having been an apple user for the last 2 years and for reasons I don't need to go into here I was really excited with the prospects of stepping away from iPhone to give the GNex and the new OS a try. However...

I was unable to really acquire even a 3G signal at my house sitting in the living room on the main floor. The vzw coverage map shows that I should have 4G here and definitely 3G. First call to tech support did all the usual resets with no real changes on signal. And when I say "signal" I mean the phone's ability to actually do something with data. I'm not one to fixate on the signal bar and I simply try to open a web browser, open a few sites and run a speed test to measure upload/download speed. I even went outside my home and walked around the yard to see if I could do any better. Once I was able to get a bar of 3G for a very short time. Tried to open the browser- webpage not avail, speedtest- couldn't complete. Got the communication issues error message. Next I wonder just where this phone will actually work on 3G and if I'm lucky 4G. So I print a map of my town and set out to drive my favorite roads to the places I usually go, stopping at intervals to record my connection results. What I found out is pretty simple. Unless this phone is fairly close to a tower it will not work in 4G mode. And, apparently, it will have a hard time switching to 3G as it seems to be trying to resolve operation in 4G. I make that last statement because of this finding: I was about to box it up after an hour of comparing it to a Razr where the Razr could show 2-3 bars of 3G and open web pages and complete a speed test and I thought I'd dig into the settings again for another look and decided to switch off the CDMA/LTE in favor of CDMA only. I had tried that on the first day and it had no effect. But this time the GNex liked that. It almost immediately found the 3G signal and it then could load a web page and complete a speed test. Sigh.

Well, there are other details but this is getting long so suffice-it-to-say that if you are ok with digging into the settings and switching the network mode manually you might get this thing to work better than what most of us have been experiencing. I'm not in for any more frustration so I returned the phone today. Oh, and by the way, the other smartphones are iPhone 4S's and they have 2-3 bars 3G, usually staying on 3 in the same living room I had the issues with on the GNex. And of course, open web pages and speedtest results are good, better than the razr (in 3G) as I recall but that could have been environmental since those tests were done a day apart.

So the icing on the cake is, and I'd like your opinion, is should I think it to be ok that Verizon charges a restocking fee on a phone that they acknowledge has issues. Most of us agree that a software fix to change how the signal strength is displayed will do nothing to fix the radio issue and real world actual data transmit and receive. I'm not likely to consider wasting too much of my time further arguing for a credit of that restocking fee but I find it aggravating that Verizon would handle this issue in this manner. I've searched quite a bit (next will be a phone call) for a copy of the "worry free guarantee". I'd like to read exactly what that means and how it relates to defective phones. Perhaps that is where the problem lies... to get a phone exchanged without a restocking fee it must be so defective that it is "dead". In this case "defective" is a bit of a grey area so we end up being tagged just a bunch of whiny customers with expectations set too high. Thoughts?