Well, I guess all roads lead to Motorola for me.
The S4 is completely dead. After the first two failures it rebooted back into ME7, but the third time was different...
After the third time, I powered it off and would not power on at all, not with the battery, not with a USB cord, not even into recovery. There is absolutely no response from any combination of button presses. It's completely toast.
So yesterday I went to the Phone Center Store. They also tried every form of button combinations, and even tried USB and a known good battery...all efforts were fruitless. I traded an old Droid Pro I had laying around for $100 Verizon Gift Card, and took the Edge option to get a Droid MAXX. For $20.83 per month, I have a new phone, and can do the same thing next year. Frankly, it's a pretty sweet deal. I'm returning the dead S4 for a new one and then selling it. The money I get from selling the CLNR Galaxy S4 makes it actually a net positive for me.
I'm happy to report that I LOVE my MAXX. ;-)
Awesome radios, build quality that is second to none, a user interface that is very close to vanilla Android, slower processor with less cores, but every bit as fast as the S4, lower resolution but my eyes can't see the difference, camera is not as nice perhaps, but I'm not using it for professional portraits or wedding photography, the battery life blows the competition out of the water and then some, overall the S4 is a nice phone, but it doesn't compare for my purposes...
