Nexus 4, Nexus 10 go on sale in select countries; sold out in minutes

As promised, Google started selling the LG Nexus 4 and Samsung Galaxy 10 devices from its Google Play store yesterday in select countries including US, UK, Canada, Australia and Germany. The devices, especially Nexus 4, were greeted by great response and was sold out in all the countries within minutes of going on sale.

Australia was first to get these devices in Google Play and it took only 22 minutes for the 16GB Nexus 4 units for get sold out and the 8GB unit also did not last more than two hours.  The 32GB version of Nexus 10 tablet did last for around five hours before going out of stock, and according to reports, only the 16GB Nexus 10 is currently available in Google Play Australia.

The Australian release was followed by availability in UK, France, Germany, and Spain, where too the devices met with similar response. The Nexus 4 16GB version lasted only 35 minutes in Google Play UK and soon Nexus 10 32GB was also sold out. Similarly, Nexus 4 was sold out within minutes in Germany.

United States and Canada were last to get the devices on Tuesday and US buyers broke the Australia record by finishing up Nexus 4 units within 20 minutes of availability. Soon all the new devices available on sale were gone.

There is no word on how much stock was available at launch, but surely the crazy pricing by Google did the job and devices were gone within minutes.

Google confirmed the same on the official Nexus Google+ page:

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.

Not so great shopping experience for Nexus buyers

While the new Nexus devices were flying off Google Play, this wasn’t really the smooth ride for buyers. We did not see many reports of issues at release in Australia, but European buyers got several errors while placing their owners. Some even reported their credit cards were charged without the order going through.

The worst of the reports came from United States where Google Play was simple not working properly. It took five-to-six tries for buyers to get their orders final and even then there were transaction issues and other problems.

Certainly Google was caught off-guard and it did not anticipate such rush, we hope Google is more careful in the future and also it gets fresh stock of new Nexus devices soon.

The devices still haven’t reached the brick and mortar stores anywhere, but it should, in the days to come, which will relieve the pressure off Google Play.