Within the last couple of weeks, I received a call out of the blue from a Verizon analyst of sorts that wanted to talk about my phone. He definitely did not know that I was the dude that writes for Droid Life, but was instead calling to see why I was using my Galaxy Nexus with 4G LTE turned off. You see, I had been at a Portland Trail Blazers game a few days before that and from what I gathered during our conversation, Verizon was seeing how well their network was holding up during a sporting event that housed around 20,000 people. They must have noticed that a large enough group of people who had 4G phones in the arena were only using 3G. I say that because the specific question to me was, “We noticed you were at the Blazers game the other night and had 4G turned off on your Galaxy Nexus. Did you manually turn it off or were you having connection issues?”
While this caught me a little off guard, he gave off the impression that he was calling all sorts of people, which was confirmed to me by another reader today who was at that very same game and received a similar call. When I responded with, “I turn it off on purpose…” he cut me off before I could finish because he knew why. Horrible battery life, something he had heard from almost everyone he called. That was his only question and the call was over.
But also this week, we heard from another reader who received a similar call, although the Verizon rep asked even more questions over a 20 minute conversation. They were curious as to whether or not he had rooted his Nexus or was using a custom ROM, if he had camera issues, how 4G to 3G handoffs were going, did he have white or black screen flashes, any random reboots, etc. Notice that many of those are issues that have filled up countless forums since this phone debuted?
It’s tough to tell if the our post-Blazers game calls were related to this lengthier conversation, but it made us curious. Has Verizon received enough complaints about the phone that an update is finally coming? Are they simply assessing network performance? What is it?
Has anyone else received a similar call? Attended a sporting event recently that was followed by a call from a VZW rep? If so, what did they ask?
Cheers brian and Will!
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