Google today began taking orders for the Nexus 4 smartphone and Nexus 10 tablet along with the 3G 32GB Nexus 7. Devices sold out very quickly across a number of countries where they went on sale. Expected to go on sale at 12:00 ET in Canada and the U.S., Google actually began taking sales about 30 minutes earlier and seemed ill-prepared for the demand by eager customers.
There’s been so much interest for the Nexus lineup that we’ve sold out of some of our initial stock in a few countries! We are working hard to add more Nexus devices to Google Play in the coming weeks to keep up with the high demand. You can learn more about Nexus devices and stay updated at play.google.com/nexus.
In Canada, the 16GB Nexus 4 sold out in mere minutes with the 8GB model not far behind. Worse, the Google Play store was unable to deal with the demand. Users reported a host of issues preventing them from placing orders. Items vanished from shopping carts mid-transactions, orders failed to process successfully, and some customers even received order cancellation emails after having successfully placed their orders. All in all, it made for a very poor customer experience and left many fuming.
The Nexus 7 and Nexus 10 tablets remain in stock in Canada at the time or writing this post. As for the Nexus 4, customers may now have to wait “weeks” to try ordering again.
Update: Google now lists the Nexus 4 as “sold out” rather than “coming soon”:
Read more: Google Android [via Google+]
So? Did you get one? I tried, but didn’t even make it to a checkout. 🙁
Got as far as the cart. Watched it vanish from there twice along with all sorts of errors.