So this is turning into a pattern: two gadgets everyone wants right now, and both of them make you wait before you get to actually use them. I've spent more of the last two weeks staring at loading bars and "add to cart" buttons than I have doing anything productive, and I figured I'd write it down before I forget how annoyed I was.
First, the Nexus 4. I don't even need a new phone, not really, my Galaxy Nexus is fine, but $299 for an unlocked 8GB phone (or $349 for the 16GB) with none of the carrier junk on it is the kind of price that makes you talk yourself into things. LG builds it, Google sells it straight through the Play Store, no contract required, and apparently half the internet wants one at that price too. It launched back on the 13th and sold out in under an hour. Since then it's just been this recurring joke: Google restocks it, Twitter lights up, and it's gone again before I've even gotten the page to load past the spinning circle. I tried again this past weekend, got all the way to the checkout page with an actual 16GB unit sitting in my cart, hit purchase, and got bounced back to an out-of-stock message. That's the third time. I'm starting to think the restock announcements are just there to give people something to be disappointed by on a schedule.
The Wii U is the other one, and this one's actually mine, I bought a Deluxe set the weekend it came out. $349, black, comes with Nintendo Land, and everybody who's had one for more than five minutes has the same story: you get it home, you're excited, you plug it in, and then it tells you there's a mandatory system update before you can do literally anything. Not download a game, not even set up your Mii. Just the update. Mine took over an hour, and I've read plenty of people saying theirs ran closer to two. My nephew, who is seven and has approximately zero patience for anything, sat in front of the thing for the first forty minutes convinced it was broken. I had to keep explaining that no, it's not frozen, it's just Nintendo's idea of a first impression, apparently.
Here's my actual complaint, not just the "ugh, waiting" complaint: for a console coming out in November 2012, shipping without the day-one patch already baked onto the disc or the internal storage is kind of embarrassing. I get that patches happen. But this wasn't a bug fix, it was basically a huge chunk of the OS that the box needed to function as advertised, and there was no way to know that until you'd already unboxed it, hooked it to your TV, and committed an hour of your evening. A little box copy, a warning on the shrink wrap, something. My internet is decent (not amazing, we're still on cable in this apartment) and it still crawled. I can only imagine what this looked like for anyone on slower service, which, in December 2012, is still a lot of people.
The thing both of these have in common, I think, is that the actual hardware in each case is good. The Nexus 4 screen is gorgeous in the demo units I've pawed at in stores, and the Wii U GamePad, once you're past the update screen, is a genuinely interesting idea, using it as a second screen for stuff like off-TV play is more useful day to day than I expected going in. It's not the products that are the problem. It's that the process of actually getting to use them has been designed, whether on purpose or through sheer lack of testing, like an obstacle course.
Anyway. I'm going to keep an eye on the Play Store for the next restock, probably obsessively, and if I actually manage to snag a Nexus 4 before Christmas I promise a real writeup, screen quality, camera, the whole thing. Until then I've got a GamePad, a Netflix app that works fine once you're through the gate, and a mild grudge against progress bars.