The Nexus 4 was a victim of its own popularity. It sold out in less than an hour in almost every market in which it debuted, and our own readers suffered through torturous wait times, server problems and reappearing “Coming Soon” notices. Now, sadly, both Nexus 4 are “Sold Out”.
My own experience mirrored many of yours: I logged on to Google Play at 11:55am ET, five minutes before the phones were ostensibly supposed to go on sale. I could see the 8GB version was in stock, but the 16GB one was “Coming Soon”, two words that would taunt potential buyers for the rest of the afternoon. Thinking that the 16GB version had yet to be posted (oh, silly me) I added an 8GB version to my cart, along with a 16GB Nexus 10, and proceeded to reload the page. After ten minutes it was obvious that either the 16GB model was never going on sale (unlikely) or was already, vexingly sold out.
Many North Americans were experiencing the same issues. Pages would miraculously refresh with stock, only to have the device removed from the Shopping Cart automatically after a few seconds. Others endured frustrating errors as they attempted to proceed with purchases. I accidentally ordered two Nexus 10’s after believing that I cancelled out of the first one, only to discover minutes later that it in fact went through.
In summation, it’s largely believed that Google messed up this launch. Either it did not anticipate such huge demand, or it purposefully kept supply low to fuel the frothy hype only seen on Apple launch days. To be fair, the Nexus 4 is garnering the same type of frothy hype only seen on Apple launch days, but it’s clear that compared to Apple, Google has a lot of work to do in the logistics department.
Sadly, the Nexus 4 did sell out and the company took to Google+ to explain what happens next. “There’s been so much interest for the Nexus lineup that we’ve sold out of some of our initial stock in a few countries! We are working hard to add more Nexus devices to Google Play in the coming weeks to keep up with the high demand.” In other words, there are going to be a number of Nexus 4’s sold for a premium in the coming weeks as impatient Android fans try to get their hands on this elusive device.
Did you manage to buy a Nexus 4? If not, what about a Nexus 7 or Nexus 10?
Via: Google+
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