Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google's Nexus 4 smartphone sells out in the US in 50 minutes

thenextweb.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 215 posts

Re: Google's Nexus 4 smartphone sells out in the US in 50 minutes

#171

Post by KirinDave »

kemiller wrote: post #28
jxi wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My gut feel is the opposite. This is a ridiculous phone, for a ridiculous price. I personally wanted it and couldn't get it Today yet, and I know of at least 5 other people (outside the US) who've been pinging me to see if it's going to be available anytime soon. Pretty sure it's a demand-issue this time.

If the numbers are good, they'll brag about them. If they don't, it's a pretty good sign that it's supply.

Given it's 50 minutes, the numbers don't have to be incredibl good to make a really impressive-sounding rate.

Let's say they had a quarter million units for sale for their first run (given their Nex7 sales, totally reasonable). That means they're selling ~80 phones a second.

Now did Apple sell more? Sure. Does that mean these numbers are bad, even in a relative sense given the obscurity of the Nexus brand, the troubles during launch and the location of sale?

No. Supply or Demand, this is good for Nexus.

Re: Google's Nexus 4 smartphone sells out in the US in 50 minutes

#172

Post by actf »

Has anyone else noticed that when you repeatedly click between the two different models in the play store, the seems to change randomly from "Coming Soon" to "Out of Stock"?

As much as I want to like Android, this is the type of experience that just makes me want to head straight back to Apple. If Google can't even get their their flagship product's launch day store working properly, do I really want to trust their customer service if I break my phone, or their ability to manage an entire mobile ecosystem?

After owning early Android devices and being incredibly disappointed at the experience (crashes, incompatibilities, lack of software, poor battery life, lack of promised updates) I swore off getting another Android device for a long time.

In the meantime I've owned apple products, and always been extremely happy with the overall experience. With the Nexus 4 announcement, I've decided to give Android another shot. As I said earlier I really want to like Android, but it's stuff like this that makes me have second thoughts, and reconsider just getting an iphone 5.

In my opinion this is a huge failure on Google's part.

Re: Google's Nexus 4 smartphone sells out in the US in 50 minutes

#174

Post by watmough »

nvarsj wrote: post #52
watmough wrote: post #30

Ok, as of 12:09pm CST, I was able to add a 16GB N4 to my cart and check-out. So either they found another pallette of the things somewhere, or people are getting cold feet and canceling their orders. Hitting F5 on the product page seems to find a phone about once every twenty times, and on about the 1/5th try to add to cart, it succeeded.

A lot of people ended up with duplicate orders from the madness this morning, and I expect they're cancelling. My co-worker ended up with 3 N4's despite only seeing one confirmation.

It's been a while since I've been so stoked about a piece of tech!

I returned my Galaxy Nexus, mainly for the poor camera, and for the fact that not one week after getting it, it was discontinued and replaced with this much nicer phone.

Re: Google's Nexus 4 smartphone sells out in the US in 50 minutes

#175

Post by chilgart »

bobf wrote: post #104

I downloaded the Auto Refresh Plus Chrome plugin, set it to auto-refresh the 16GB page ( https://play.google.com/store/devices/details?id=nexus_4_16g... ) every 1s and set the "Popup notification once FIND the target" option using the word "STOCK". I went through 3-4 false starts of trying to add it to cart and having it fail, but it eventually succeeded and I was able to add to cart and complete the purchase at 3:04…

Thanks for the comment. I managed to snag a 16GB at 6:08 EST and I'm crossing my fingers that the order doesn't get lost.

Re: Google's Nexus 4 smartphone sells out in the US in 50 minutes

#176

Post by Klinky »

kamjam wrote: post #94
kalleboo wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if they only take a hold to ensure the funds are on the card, many (most?) banks won't tell you that the money wasn't charged yet, and they'll make it unavailable.

Then why don't they just charge the card before they ship... and if that fails then they send you an email saying so, amend your details within 48 hours or it ships to the next person in line. Not exactly difficult.

...and if they semi-randomly charge someone over their credit limit or overdraft their bank account, or someone forgets entirely that they signed up and submits a chargeback?

Re: Google's Nexus 4 smartphone sells out in the US in 50 minutes

#177

Post by mda »

krzyk wrote: post #136
vondur wrote: post #3

It would be nice if Google would release some sales numbers on this. I'd imagine it would sell well in Europe where the lack of LTE is not an issue. I don't see it selling that well in the US, most people here get new phones every two years when their contracts are up at subsidized pricing.

Why lack of LTE is not an issue in Europe? Is the coverage in Europe smaller then in the US? In Poland 35% population is covered with LTE, so I would assume rest of the Europe has at least that.

LTE is very new and data plans are usually terrible in a lot of European countries.

Re: Google's Nexus 4 smartphone sells out in the US in 50 minutes

#178

Post by tehayj »

jbail wrote: post #114
hnalien wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Update at 11:30 PST - Bought the 16GB successsfully. Took 2 mins. I believe the 'Sold Out' news in the morning drove more customers curiously to the Google Play website, thus letting them buy it today even if they wanted to wait. No one wants a supply issue like the iPhone 5. As I thought, Google is way smarter than Apple to be prepared for high volume sales on it's platform. Well played, Google.

I don't think this was well played by Google or intentional at all. The Google Play website is still down. Tarnishing your brand in front of current and potential customers just to try out a guerrilla marketing tactic is just plain stupid. A much better tactic would be to have a site that's up, responsive and presents a simple, joyful order process. That would win evangelists. People could point to the Nexus 4 launch…

When people hear about the struggle to get one of these phones they get curious. I clicked like crazy to and luckily bought two phones... I have to say I look now a bit more forward to them because they took effort to get. This kind of stuff works for most human minds.

Re: Google's Nexus 4 smartphone sells out in the US in 50 minutes

#179

Post by steve-howard »

jxi wrote: post #159
rufugee wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow...so to insure working across all carriers, they cut out two very large carriers? This doesn't make sense to me.

Uh.. they didn't 'cut out' anything. If anything, it's the carriers that are stupid for not adopting the same standard of using sim cards (Verizon and Sprint don't use sim cards..). I think they wanted to lock people in to their service.

It's more than "adopting" sim cards. Verizon and Sprint are CDMA networks, and incompatible at the very root with GSM networks like T-Mo and AT&T.

Re: Google's Nexus 4 smartphone sells out in the US in 50 minutes

#180

Post by Greynum »

uzusan wrote: post #100
Greynum wrote: post #93

This joker is selling his nexus 4 for £1200 ($1900) in the UK http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/lg-GOOGLE-NEXUS-4-8GB-UNLOCKED-BRA...

I'm pretty sure selling something you don't actually have isn't allowed on ebay (he's selling a phone he hasn't received, and in all likelyhood wont receive as google could quite easily cancel the other 2 orders as they seem to be a mistake).

The bid is now at £2050 ($3280), mind you they are all from accounts with 0 history. Only one bidder has a history and its at 40.
Post reply on HN