So Tuesday was the big Nexus 4 launch, and if you were anywhere near Twitter that afternoon you already know how it went. Google opened up the Play Store listing right around 9am Pacific, the phone was $299 for the 8GB model and $349 for 16GB, no contract, unlocked, and by like 9:20 the checkout process was just completely broken for most people. I had a tab open and everything. Refreshed it probably forty times.
I want to be clear that Im not even mad about the phone itself, I think LG built something genuinely good here for the price, its got that 4.7 inch True HD IPS display and the specs are basically flagship-tier for a third of what youd pay for an iPhone 5 outright. Its the execution of the sale that was a mess. People were getting the little "Add to Cart" button to work, then hitting an error on the payment step, then getting kicked back to a page that said the item was unavailable, then refreshing and finding it back in stock again for a second. Total chaos. A friend of mine in Chicago managed to get one through, then got an email an hour later saying his order had been "auto-cancelled," no explanation given. Hes still annoyed about it, I talked to him on gchat last night and he hasnt let it go.
This is not a new problem for Google, either. Anybody who tried to buy a Galaxy Nexus last year remembers this exact same story, and the Nexus 7 launch back in the summer had its own version of it too. Youd think by the third or fourth time they'd have the infrastructure sorted, but apparently not. I get that demand forecasting is hard and I get that this is a low-margin, high-volume play for them, selling hardware near cost to push their own ecosystem instead of gouging on price. Thats honestly the part I respect. But if youre going to sell direct-to-consumer with no carrier subsidy involved, the actual purchasing experience has to work, thats the whole pitch. A $299 unlocked phone that you literally cannot buy isnt cheaper than the $650 unlocked phone you actually can buy.
By that evening, eBay listings for Nexus 4s were already up around $450-500, which is a pretty depressing but predictable outcome. Ive never understood the appeal of paying scalper prices for a phone that's going to restock eventually, but I guess if you want to be on the market with the new thing right this second, that's your call to make. Not mine.
On a related note, the HTC 8X started showing up at more carriers this week too, T-Mobile picked it up on the 14th after AT&T had it exclusively for the first week or so. Its a good looking phone, that skinny aluminum unibody thing HTC does, comes in that blue-purple color they call "California Blue" which is a weird name for a phone color but whatever. Windows Phone 8 still feels like its fighting an uphill battle for attention though. Every conversation I have about it goes the same way: person says "oh that tile interface looks nice," I say "yeah try it sometime," and then nothing happens. The app gap is still real and I dont think a slick launcher fixes that on its own.
Anyway. I did eventually get a Nexus 4 order through around 1pm, after giving up and coming back to it during lunch. No confirmation email yet as of writing this, so we'll see if it actually ships or if I get the same auto-cancel treatment my friend did. If it shows up I'll probably write something longer about actually using the thing once Ive had it a week or two, since first-day impressions of any new gadget are basically useless anyway, you dont know how a phone is until youve dropped it once and left it in a hot car by accident.
Also, mildly unrelated, but Wii U launches this coming Sunday and I know at least two people from my old office who are planning to line up for midnight release stuff. Never been a line-up-at-midnight guy myself. I'd rather just walk in on a random Tuesday afternoon two weeks later when nobody cares anymore and the store has like nine of them sitting on a shelf.