So this happened a couple days ago and I'm still a little annoyed about it: Google straight up leaked its own phone. Sometime Friday, the Nexus 5 showed up live on the Google Play Store, complete with product photos, both storage tiers, and pricing, before anybody at Google had said a word about it officially. Android Police grabbed screenshots before it got pulled, and now the whole internet has the specs everybody was already pretty sure about anyway (5-inch screen, Snapdragon 800, that squarish camera bump) confirmed in writing. $349 for 16GB, $399 for 32GB, no contract. Rumor sites had guessed close to that already, so it's not some shocking revelation, but there's a difference between "leaked benchmark screenshots from some Chinese forum" and "the actual store page Google itself built."
I get that these things happen. Somebody on a product team fat-fingers a publish button, a CDN caches a page a few hours early, whatever. But this is at least the second time in a row Google has managed to spoil its own Nexus reveal before the actual event, and at some point you have to wonder if anyone over there even cares anymore. The official unveiling is supposedly this Thursday alongside KitKat, and now that event is going to be a formality where a guy on stage reads off numbers we already have written down. Not exactly the way you want to launch a flagship phone.
Which, side note, brings up Nexus 4 launch day, because I will never not bring this up. Last November the Play Store listing went live, sold out in something like 30 minutes, came back in stock, sold out again, and then for a solid two weeks anyone trying to actually order one got bounced around checkout errors or stuck behind an infinite loading spinner. I refreshed that page more times than I want to admit on my lunch break at work, got the phone in my cart exactly once, and watched the session time out before checkout finished. Took me until the following week to actually get an order to stick. So when I see Google fumbling the reveal of the follow-up phone, forgive me for not being shocked that the launch itself might also be a mess. If the Play Store can't keep a product page under wraps for four more days, I don't have high hopes for it surviving actual demand on release day.
None of this really changes whether the phone is good, obviously. On paper it looks like the best Nexus yet, and a sub-$400 unlocked phone with top-tier specs is still a genuinely weird thing Google does that nobody else really matches. LG building it again after the 4 seems like a smart call too, that partnership actually worked out well as far as I can tell. I just think it's funny, and a little sloppy, that the surprise is gone a week before KitKat is supposed to be the big reveal moment. Half the announcement is already used up.
Also, separate thing, but this was the same week Apple did their whole "we still have a lot to cover" event and pushed Mavericks out as a free update, which is its own conversation I'm not going to get into here since I'm pretty sure that's been covered to death everywhere else already. I installed it Tuesday night on the work laptop out of curiosity and mostly just noticed Finder tabs and better battery reporting, nothing life altering. Anyway.
Point is, four days from now we get the "official" Nexus 5 announcement, and it's going to feel a little anticlimactic walking in already knowing the price, the storage options, and roughly what it looks like from three different angles. I'll probably still order one the second preorders open, because I always do, and I'll probably still hit some checkout error along the way, because that seems to be tradition at this point. Just don't expect me to act surprised on Thursday.