Sprint Galaxy Nexus stuck in boot-loop I have a stock Sprint Galaxy Nexus device. This device is unrooted, I have made no changes to the OS / Rom whatsoever.

Today this device froze, it was showing a completely black screen except for the system bar at the bottom of the screen (with back, home, and the app tabs button) None of these buttons would respond to any input. Nor did the power button have any effect.

It sat in this state for several minutes. Eventually I pulled he battery, upon re-inserting it and turning the device back on it booted up all the way but shortly after the boot was complete it just started rebooting again without warning. This happened several times (enough that I feel it would have gone on forever if I had not intervened)

My question is: how do I recover my Galaxy Nexus device so that it can get out of this boot-loop that it is stuck in. This seems to be the same issue that was faced in this question: Galaxy Nexus Suddenly restarts but there is no real resolution given there.
To fix my device I did the following:


pull the battery to get the device to stay off (if you are quick you
might be able to hold the power button and select shut down before it
reboots)
While the device is off hold both volume buttons and the power button. This will bring up a bootloader menu
Use the volume buttons to change selection to "Recovery Mode" Press Power button to select
Once there is an Android guy with an exclamation on the screen press Volume Up+Power at the same time. I had to try a few times to get it to work. Seems like you have to hit them in just the right way.
This will bring you to another menu that you navigate with volume buttons and select with power. Choose "Factory reset" 
Wait several minutes for the reset to complete. Once it is done select reboot. 
At this point my device booted back up fine but was still stuck in a boot loop. I panicked slightly
Get the device to the Off state again. Either by pulling the battery or holding power and selecting shut down from the menu quickly while it is actually on. I went with the latter this time, though I did have to be quick about it to not be interrupted by a reboot.
Press the power button to begin turning the device on
When you see the "Google" logo press and hold the volume down button. Continue holding the volume down button until the device is fully up and running. You should see "Safe mode" in the lower left corner. 
While in safe mode my device did not reboot itself. I took this opportunity to complete all of the device setup menus
once done setting up the device I turned it off and back on in the normal manner
once it came back up it was no longer stuck in boot-loop.


Note: I factory reseted the device because it isn't the phone I carry and it had nothing I cared about on it. If you are having this issue with your real phone I suggest trying safe mode before resetting as the actual reset didn't seem to fix it.