After a long process, I finally received my Nexus 4 this week. Once I heard that the N4 was released (in a press conference cancelled by Hurricane Sandy), I knew that I was going to buy it (perhaps related to this cycle). I patiently waited till the release date on November 13, with my heart intent on the 8GB version (it’s cheaper and I don’t need that much space anyways). I knew it was going to be popular and so was going to employ my ticket-buying skills & strategy; basically buy it right when it was released.

Well I would do that provided I wasn’t asleep at the time. No one knew when it was going to be released, some said 0h EST, some said 0h PST (3AM EST), some said 9AM EST, some said 9AM PST. It turned out to be 9AM PST which was noon for me. I had been keeping an eye on forums throughout the morning to find out the time, and had checked around 11:30AM in preparation. It turns out that they started selling it a few minutes after I checked, and I didn’t realize until I checked the forums at 11:40. By then, the phones weren’t sold out yet but I could only get as far adding an 8GB to my cart – when I tried to pay I would get an error (and I had prepared by entering all my info into Google Wallet beforehand!)

I had just experienced an event that was shared amongst a lot of other nerds around the world. Google had underestimated the popularity of a cheap phone that had top-of-the-line specifics, both in terms of inventory and their purchasing system. You might say that I was lucky though, because many who had successful orders would end up waiting several weeks to receive their phones as Google dealt with stock issues.

Finally in December, I received an email that N4s were instock and to be sold to Canada in under 2 hours. Using the skills I practiced the last time around, I was able to buy one! I still ran into several errors, and couldn’t buy one for five minutes, but at least I got my order through eventually. Fortunately, the restricted sales to one per account and had a moving shipping window to handle their stock (I ended up in the 1-2 week window).

After a 2 week wait, I received the phone and the first thing I did was to unlock the bootloader and flash CWM recovery. I suppose I should have powered the phone on first because when I tried that afterwards, it ended up hanging on the boot animation. If you run into this problem, to get back into business, you’ll need to wipe the cache and dalvik cache before rebooting.

Posted by Kevin in Blogs Tags: android, cellphones, google, techlust