So Nobody Actually Got a Nexus 4 Yesterday

Yesterday morning I had one browser tab open and it wasn't email, it wasn't Twitter, it was the Google Play Store, sitting there at 8:59am my time waiting for the clock to tick over to 9. The Nexus 4 went on sale and within about twenty minutes the whole thing fell over. Error messages, blank checkout pages, people getting charged and then not getting a confirmation, the works. I refreshed that page so many times my finger genuinely got tired, which is a sentence I did not expect to type in 2012.

For anyone who missed it: the Nexus 4 is the new LG-built flagship Google phone, and the pitch is honestly pretty great on paper. $299 for the 8GB model, $349 for 16GB, unlocked, no contract, no carrier subsidy games. Compare that to what youd pay for an unlocked iPhone 5 (northward of $650) and it looks like a steal. Quad-core Snapdragon S4 Pro, 4.7 inch display, stock Android 4.2 which is the version that just shipped with it. On spec sheet alone its one of the best phones youll see all year for the money.

Except almost nobody could actually buy one. The Play Store choked almost immediately. I watched the "add to cart" button just spin for a solid two minutes before dumping me to a generic error page. Tried again, got further, made it to checkout, and then got kicked out entirely and had to start over. By the time I got a cart to actually go through, both the 8GB and 16GB models were showing as unavailable. The whole window was maybe forty five minutes, tops, and thats being generous.

Ive seen a few different numbers floating around today for how long it stayed in stock and none of them agree, which tells you something about how chaotic it actually was. What I do know is my own experience, and my own experience is that I sat in a coffee shop on genuinely terrible wifi (the kind where you can watch the little wheel spin and start bargaining with it) refreshing a phone store instead of doing actual work, and I still ended up with nothing to show for it.

Heres my actual complaint though, and its not really about the crash. Servers fall over during big launches, thats basically a tradition at this point, Apple does it too. My complaint is that theres no LTE on this thing. None. In November 2012, shipping a flagship phone with HSPA+ and no LTE radio is a strange call, especially when Verizon and AT&T customers here have had LTE options for a while now. I get that Google wanted a clean unlocked global device and LTE bands are a mess to support across carriers, thats a real technical headache, Im not pretending its trivial. But it still stings a little to see "best value flagship of the year" and "no LTE" in the same sentence.

Anyway. I didnt get one. Ill probably try again whenever the next restock happens, assuming Google actually announces it ahead of time instead of just quietly flipping a switch and letting Twitter figure it out, which is basically what happened yesterday. A few people I follow got lucky and grabbed a 16GB model in the first few minutes, and if you were one of the ones who did, Id genuinely like to hear how the phone feels once youve had it running for a few days, because on paper this is the phone I want to be recommending to people who ask me what to buy that isnt an iPhone.

For now Im just annoyed, mildly impressed by the price, and back to my current phone for at least another few weeks. Which, fine. Its not the worst thing in the world to keep the phone I already like using. But I did have a whole afternoon planned around setting up a new device yesterday and instead I spent it staring at a spinner, so thats where were at.

If Google reads this (they dont, obviously, but if): a queue system. Even a bad one. Anything other than "checkout button that eats your order and gives you nothing back."