So I've had a browser tab open on the Play Store for something like three days now. Not constantly staring at it, I have a job, but every hour or so I alt-tab over and hit refresh like a rat pressing the lever for a food pellet. The Nexus 4 is doing that thing again where it appears for sale for eleven minutes and then goes right back to "Sold Out," and at this point I've started treating it less like a phone launch and more like a standing appointment I keep missing.
For anyone who hasn't been following along: the Nexus 4 came out back on November 13th. $299 for the 8GB, $349 for the 16GB, no contract, made by LG, sold straight through the Play Store or through T-Mobile if you wanted a carrier subsidy instead. It sold out in under half an hour on day one. Since then Google's been trickling out restocks every week or two, and every single one disappears almost immediately. I missed the first two rounds entirely — the second one I was literally sitting there with the page loaded and it still went from "Available" to gone in the time it took me to pick a color.
I don't think this is some grand conspiracy about manufactured scarcity, if that's what you're thinking. LG just doesn't have the capacity, apparently, and Google underestimated demand by a wide margin. It happens. But it's a genuinely weird way to sell hardware in 2012, going around the carriers entirely and just... not having enough units, over and over, for a month straight. My friend Dev finally got his in the second batch and has been insufferable about it since, texting me screenshots of Play Store icons like he's taunting a starving man with a sandwich.
Here's my actual opinion, and I know it's not a popular one: I don't care that it doesn't have LTE. I've seen at least four separate comment threads calling this a dealbreaker, and I get why on paper it sounds bad, flagship phone in December 2012 running HSPA+ instead of LTE. But I've been on a Galaxy Nexus on T-Mobile's HSPA+ network for over a year now and it has never once felt like the bottleneck in my day. Streaming works fine. Maps load fine. My actual complaint about my current phone is the battery, not the radio. LTE matters a lot if you're on Verizon's network where it's genuinely a different tier of speed, but on T-Mobile the gap between HSPA+ and LTE right now is nowhere near as dramatic as people are making it out to be. I think a chunk of the outrage is spec-sheet outrage, not actual-use outrage.
What I do think is a legitimate gripe is the buying experience itself. There's something almost insulting about a company as big as Google not being able to keep a $299 phone in stock for more than ten minutes at a stretch, especially heading into the last full shopping weekend before Christmas. If you wanted to give someone a Nexus 4 this year and you're not already camped on refresh, you are probably out of luck, and Google hasn't given a real timeline for when that changes. There were reports of them acknowledging the shortage and apologizing, which is nice, I guess, but an apology doesn't put a phone in a box.
Small tangent: I've noticed the restocks seem to cluster around weird hours, at least from what I've caught. Not always the same time of day, which makes the refreshing worse because there's no pattern to exploit. I set an alarm for 6:47 the other morning based on absolutely no evidence, just a hunch from a forum post, and got nothing for my trouble except being awake at 6:47.
Anyway. My Galaxy Nexus screen has a hairline crack in the corner from a sidewalk incident I'd rather not describe in detail, so I have actual motivation here beyond wanting a shiny new thing. If the tab is still open next week I might just cave and grab the T-Mobile version with the two-year agreement instead, which feels like giving up but also feels like sleep, and sleep is looking pretty good right now.
If anyone reading this actually managed to snag one in the last restock, tell me your secret. I assume it involves either luck or a script I'm too lazy to write.