Galaxy Nexus Updated to Android 4.1, at Least for Verizon

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The Verizon Galaxy Nexus drama continues today with another exciting episode featuring a new sighting of one of the most expected Android handsets this holiday season. We’ve seen Verizon’s official Galaxy Nexus images leaked twice so far and today we’re looking at a screenshot taken on the Ice Cream Sandwich smartphone.

It turns out that one user that has access to the smartphone posted an image on My Droid World to highlight a new feature of the handset, an updated firmware. The image suggests that Verizon will launch the Galaxy Nexus with Android 4.1 on board instead of the Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich version we were expecting.

Android 4.1 also appears to come with a new radio baseband version, which could explain why the handset has been delayed without explanation. At the same time we’ll remind you that the European Galaxy Nexus has been found to suffer from a 2G-related bug that affected the volume of the device without the user actually pressing any buttons and that Samsung confirmed to have found a fix.

Is the Android 4.1 update related in any way to the volume bug described in the past weeks? At this time it is not clear whether the bug only affected Galaxy Nexus trying to connect to a 2G GSM network or whether it would also affect the CDMA/LTE Galaxy Nexus model heading to Verizon as well. Whatever the case may be, it’s clear that Verizon may have had some serious concerns with the handset during internal testing, which could have caused the unexpected delay. So it wasn’t just the need for buzz, was it Verizon? Not that Big Red will ever explain to its customers – mere mortals – why this flagship handset is taking its time to hit stores.

What we don’t have for you today is a new launch date. Last we heard, Best Buy listed the device as “in stock” starting with December 11. But we’ll remind you that Canadian Galaxy Nexus sales are set to start on December 7.