Only the black 16GB version in the UK store at the minute. Selling for £299.99. Looks like a really nice device. I got the Nexus 4 in July and have liked it but found it lacking in a few areas. Looking forward to trying the 5.
I'm not sure if they will deliver, but they did accept my order for the 32GB version. The 16GB page does look "broken" to me as well - no 32GB button or white version button.
I've just received a confirmation email for a 32GB B&W. Although it says that they'll actually take my money when it ships out to me, so I'm still holding my breath a bit :)
And I agree. The way Google does this with an error page for non serviced locations feels really off. It's not how the web is supposed to work. Not shipping to other countries is bad enough. This is rude.
They do put them on Amazon. Then you get to the checkout, and Amazon tells you you're not allowed to ship it to where you live if you're outside of Google's allowed territories.
That's why I had to send my sister in the UK money to get my hands on my Nexus 4... annoying, and stupid.
Amazon is annoying in the opposite way. Even if you're logged in, they give no indication at all that they won't ship something to you until you actually try to buy it. Very irritating when comparing several options to have to add every one to the cart to check that you can actually buy it before wasting the time of considering it too carefully.
GeoIP isn't really a good solution. I work on a large ecommerce site and this comes up from time to time. GeoIP databases are unreliable at best, especially for areas where IPs tend to jump borders (e.g., Toronto and Detroit)
But they wouldn't need to use it for anything critical. Just for a message like, "It appears that we can't ship this to your current location: Calgary, AB, Canada. Please _log in_ to check availability to your shipping address," or something along those lines.
And if it thinks I'm in Montana? I don't get that message, and assume since in the past it knew I was in Calgary so I must be safe to add it to my cart.
At least I know right now that I have to log in all the time to be sure I can safely add items to my cart
But the worst case then is that you add something to your cart and then find out later that you can't buy it, just like now. It's not going to make the cart self-destruct. ;)
If it thinks you're in Montana once, it's probably going to every time. So you'll see exactly what you see now. Heck, maybe this is exactly what they DO do, and it thinks I'm in Washington so I never get a message. :) But for the majority of cases where it can geolocate the country properly, at least to the resolution of US vs not-US, it would be helpful.
Hmm, I just double-checked and I don't get that. I'm in Canada. Have two addresses registered, both Canadian. For example, [1] is appears to be available, and also claims to have free shipping (as do many items listed on amazon.com eve though the free shipping is US only). When I add it to my cart, proceed to checkout, and choose an address though, it lets me know about the "slight problem" with my order... the fact that I can't get it.
Maybe it's only Amazon Fulfillment items that do this?
But I am logged in and have set a default shipping address. So either it's different depending on country, or it's because this item is a fulfillment item, or if you're also in Canada and looking at the same item... I don't know, I guess Amazon just doesn't like me?
It's not just you. I get the same behavior. Logged in with default shipping address (Hong Kong), but only find out on proceeding to checkout as you described.
> The way Google does this with an error page for non serviced locations feels really off.
And hypocritical, given they are quick enough to penalise sites which present different content to there crawler than everyone else. Presenting different information by way of adding a warning ("we can not currently supply thsi item to the location you seem to be calling from, please come back later and in the meantime let's have a look at what you could have won...") would be fine, but an error feels like "you can't have one and we don't care".
Amazon sometimes also refuses to ship to certain countries. I remember when I tried to order something but couldn't find it on amazon.de or amazon.co.uk. I could find it on amazon.com, but they refused to ship. Very annoying.
Unfortunately it shows the 32gb version as $150 more expensive than the US version (at 449AUD or 426.51USD at today's rate). Plus they charge more for postage.
I think your maths is wrong. I just paid $399 + $34.91 sales tax for the 32 GB model here in California. $426.51 means you get it for about $7 less. Enjoy it!
I think I should have clarified that this was for Australia. Yes, I can buy the US version and I probably will but the fact that Google is using dodgy regional pricing irks me.
I think it's Ireland, in Luxembourg we have Amazon, Skype, eBay & Paypal (Paypal has a bank license that's why they moved to Luxembourg according to [1]).
In Switzerland they have a research center but it's not their main EU HQ
Google really loves their geolocation. It's a bit absurd that when I'm signed in to Google, they still try to give me sites in German, Czech or Swedish based on my location when I've expressed my preference for English in my account settings (not to mention the browser's Accept-Language header).
I'm guessing here, but I think there might be some correlation between people who travel internationally a lot and people who buy high-end smartphones. Making it difficult for people traveling internationally to buy apps or to buy devices and have them shipped to their homes isn't exactly smart. I used X11 forwarding over SSH to run a browser on my VPS to make sure they let me order my Nexus 5 in the US while I'm in Germany.
Yes, for some reason Accept-Language is totally ignored. It's quite annoying when you travel and suddenly the language changes. The trend to favor geolocation is almost ubiquitous. Few people care about user preferences in the browser, which is the standard way to do it.
Google has always done this, if really always felt like they're so smug they know better than you. I've been complaining about it for well over a decade, and the reason is I travel a lot for business and hit exactly the problems you describe. It was the main impetus to move beyond Google's garden.
There is the "ncr" workaround for some of their idiotness but it doesn't always work. I was sad to see Bing copy this cancer "feature" as well a few years ago.
I'm regularly amazed at how poor Google are at getting this right. Both of the following have occurred to me in the last week alone:
1) Friend and I both have nexus devices, both setup in English with Google accounts signed in, both residing in Hong Kong. Friend creates calendar event and sends invite to to me. I get the invite in GMail entirely in Chinese with no translation links in English.
2) Install app that requires access to Google account services. App opens browser and attempts to get account permission. Google.com shows permission granting page entirely in Chinese with no English links to change language. To make things worse, the Yes / No buttons are both blue, preventing even inferring which one is which.
This last case is especially ridiculous. A nexus device, setup in English language, logged into English language Google account, browser on the device logged into Google account, and yet Google.com page displays permissions page in Chinese.
I used X11 forwarding over SSH to run a browser on my VPS
Running a browser remotely in that way can be quite painful. Running Firefox locally you can tell it to use a socks proxy on localhost:1080 after connecting to your VPS with "ssh -D 1080". You may also want to set the about:config setting network.proxy.socks_remote_dns to true.
Or you could use VPN software, but that's more to setup, and you already have ssh access.
Yes, it's a little laggy. I tried Firefox, which was extremely slow, Chromium, which wouldn't run on VZ and finally Arora, which was tolerable. Yours is probably a better way, which I'll keep in mind for the future. The remote browser wouldn't work at all for a highly interactive app or multimedia.
ssh -D sounds like a good solution to the problem. ssh is a powerful tool with a lot of options that are well worth learning. Many of these options are not, however, "obvious". If you doing anything with UI, I hope you aren't in the mindset that every every feature is obvious.
Google's services seem to have disconnected language settings or something on their side is just broken. I live in Sweden, have everything set to Swedish but I've also lived in Germany and I have a second Google account (Google Apps work account) which is set to English.
Every time I open a page it's like Google randomly picks one (or more) languages out of Swedish, English, German (it /really/ likes German though - also always places me in the middle of Germany when I go to Google Maps) and displays them to me. The worst case I've seen was when they launched the new Google Maps preview and that page header was in Swedish, the body in English and just the button in the middle in German.
It's not even geolocation, I am in the UK and I still get the message that "google play devices is not available in your country". I need to go into incognito mode to see it.
I don't understand why would that be, I've got my google account in English, I've got a UK-based address added to it,as well as a UK-based billing address. I don't understand.
Ignoring the browser language pref (Accept-Language) to
get you to make an account - this annoyance has been there since they started offering different language versions.
It also ignores the fact that I'm signed in to my account. There's a separate preference cookie that remembers the language, but it has to be set for each country-specific domain. There's http://google.com/ncr but that doesn't solve the problem across all google services. Buying things is especially problematic.
That's my biggest gripe with Google. I'm Spanish, but for most of the subjects I typically search for (programming, research, etc.) I prefer to get results in English. I have everything in my Google preferences set to English, but Google insists on prioritizing pages in Spanish. So often I search for an API documentation, for example, and I have to skip through a bunch of incomplete or outdated translations before I find the original English page I was looking for.
Some years ago, I used the workaround of going to www.google.co.uk (google.com would still prioritize Spanish, but other regional versions, like co.uk, would show results in their language), but now it no longer works. No matter if I go to the Swedish, German or Chinese versions, and no matter my Google preferences, I still get results in Spanish.
Sometimes I even use inferior search engines due to this.
What's also annoying is how many mobile apps which otherwise would be great especially for travelers are forbidden for downloads from other countries. Yelp and Hailo are 2 great examples, both do not allow visitors coming to the US from other countries to use them. So people choose Uber and Google Maps/4sq and the losers are Hailo and Yelp.
I'm having a hard time finding the specifics on this. Do you know if this is due to it not supporting Verizon's CDMA/LTE bands, or due to a bureaucratic/carrier certification issue?
It looks to me like LTE on Verizon wouldn't be supported (bands 4 and 13), but technical CDMA should work?
Part of the problem is since Verizon is CDMA and there's not really SIM cards, they can just say: "Your ESN doesn't look like a device we want to support, you can't activate it, sucks to be you"
This doesn't sound completely accurate. 4G devices that Verizon does support, like the Galaxy Nexus, do indeed have a SIM(-like?) card that you need in order to use the device on Verizon's network.
All non-LTE communication relies on the ESN number only. If Verizon doesn't assign a Verizon ESN number to a device and/or refuses to activate whatever ESN the device may already have then you're out of luck. You want Verizon to give you an ESN they'll agree to activate and you're not Apple? Make sure the word "Verizon" is physically printed on the phone, make sure you include a bunch of bloatware, don't ever try releasing software updates because we'll delay them by months, etc.. etc...
You don't have to deal with this kind of nonsense with GSM carriers so long as you have an unlocked phone you're good to go.
That's kind of interesting. They seem to be tracking the expected delivery date really well. At first, it says 1-2 business days. Then it went to November 5th, then it moved to November 8th. The black 16gb is moving the quickest at the moment.
It's quite depressing that a 350$ phone will probably translate to 460€ in Belgium and the Netherlands. That's 626$ if you use the official exchange course between euro's and dollars.
We don't have phones on Google Play.
EDIT: Strike that, it's dropped to 399€, that's still 543$.
I can't be the only one thinking $350 for a phone you'll get rid of or hopefully trade-in in two years, is still a lot of money. Firefox, get your ass in gear and improve your OS!
Why would a new OS lower the price of the phones? Its the hardware that is expensive. In addition, in case of Nexus smartphones, it looks more like Google subsidised them, lowering the price.
You are of course right, but I'm not sure if people in the US ordering over the internet actually pay sales tax on devices ordered from the google play store. It might depend on what state they're in though.
The 32GB came out to about $445 after taxes and shipping in WA, a state with a relatively higher sales tax but no income tax. Since used 16GB iPhone 5/5c models are going for around $400 on Craigslist in the Seattle area, I think this phone is something of a bargain.
You do make a fair point from a future proofing perspective, however worth noting that 4.4 brings zram, which is in-memory page compression (OSX Mavericks just brought that functionality there, so you may have heard about it).
>That strikes me as odd. Why would Verizon not want any phone on their network that isn't incompatible or defective so as to cause problems?
I don't know, and whenever I ask people on Reddit and real-life phone people about that, I get vague answers that there is bad blood or that I"m wrong for asking.
4.95" 1920x1080 display (445 ppi), it reads. Does those specs make this phone the one with highest DPI ever? It is certainly above retina display, right?
Well 1080p is nice in that it is quite widespread standard and as such eg display cloning from your phone to a desktop monitor/tv/projector should be trivial. Also you can play media content without needing to downscale (albeit this is fairly minor advantage).
Just because you can't perceive individual pixels doesn't mean you can't perceive higher quality. Imagine if you wanted to draw a human hair to scale, you would need some small pixels to make that look good.
However in most smartphone use cases, that's probably not an issue.
In that particular use case, what stops you from laying an actual human hair onto your screen? I just had to take one of it, so they go there out of their own volition.
245 ppi is nowhere near what the human eye can perceive. You can make all kinds of assumptions about view distance and so on, but higher resolution is almost always a better thing when rendering text, rich content, and so on. You kind of sound like the people of the past who said "we'll never need a terabyte of storage" or "256 MB of RAM is enough for anyone" and so on.
It's insane that this phone has a better screen than a great deal of laptops for sale these days. The laptop manufacturers need to get with the program :-/
Forget laptops; this is where most desktop displays top out! It's ridiculous that some manufacturers literally sell 27" displays with the same number of pixels as this phone's 5" screen.
You can thank marketing, again, for that. "High Definition" came along and it seems the only resolutions people could now think of were 720 and 1080. I had a CRT monitor in 1999 that was doing 1600x1200. I also have a 16:10 monitor right now, which they seem to be moving away from and going to 16:9. Desktops are now caught between the forces of TV and mobile devices.
I was monitor shopping recently and finally decided simply not to upgrade for now after becoming fed up with seeing the "full HD" moniker used all over as if it were the end of display history.
4K, 24", reasonably affordable. When it happens, I won't mind if the desktop display market gets stuck in that rut for awhile.
Are there any reviews out yet on the echo cancellation? The Nexus 4 suffers from a bug that makes most VOIP apps useless. [1] Even though this should have been fixed by now, I would upgrade to the Nexus 5 if it only fixes this.
The underlying problem of that bug (missing audiofx support) was fixed with the Android 4.3 update. It's up to app developers to make use of the APIs now. See comment #20 on the page you linked in your post, where I describe the issue in more detail.
Thank you, I didn't know it was fixed. I did see your comment before and thought that those APIs still were not accessible. But I've seen good reviews of CSipSimple on Nexus 4 recently, suggesting that the problem may have been fixed.
"Sorry! Devices on Google Play is not available in your country yet.
We're working to bring devices to more countries as quickly as possible.
Please check back again soon."
I still don't understand why they only sell this in some EU countries and not others. Friends in the know tell me it's something to do with certification which seems strange inside the EU.
But even if that's the case surely they could just show me the damn page and then tell me they can't ship to my address. That's what Amazon does for some things anyway. At least that way I could look at the damn thing and potentially have it shipped somewhere else.
Maybe EU should fine google like they do microsoft. But the countries tat actually make those decisions don't get that message. So much for the EU equality.
I think it's just simple economics- they would have weighed up the Google Play income they get from various markets and the benefits they get from subsidising the device in relation to that. I live in New Zealand which is just too small a market for them to worry about, even though it would be simple to ship here from Australia. We'll still get the device, like any other, but through LG's distributor's rather than from Google.
It's disappointing that they're already sold out, less than an hour after this link was posted. After last year's debacle, I was expecting Google to prepare appropriately for the release.
So the device is unavailable in Canada. Is this going to be another Nexus 4 debacle, with nowhere near enough stock to meet demand? If so, how long until we get another "email me when there's more in stock" app?
I thought Canada was still in love with blackberry. It makes me wonder if this is some sort of marketing ploy microsoft tried with the surface having lines and being sold out.
It seems like they are "metering" the sales by making them available at a certain rate.
When I first went to the play store site, it showed "sold out". Later on, I refreshed the page randomly and it showed the price tag button which lets you order. I tried to order it, but by the time I got to the checkout page it showed my shopping cart as empty. Going back to the front page showed "sold out again".
I waited a while, reloaded once in a while until I saw the price button again, and clicked through really fast to the checkout screen and I was able to purchase one.
aiaf is likely talking from a relative perspective, and the G1, Nexus One, Galaxy Nexus S...they all were somewhat in line with contemporaries. The Nexus 4 was a massive regression compared to its kin.
My Nexus 4 camera is better than my Nexus One and my Nexus S. Did the Galaxy Nexus have an amazing camera or something? All I heard was people complaining about that one too.
It seems your comment doesn't fit with reality. ;)
I don't think it is your case..But I just want to tell you my personal story about why my dad kept on complaining that the camera is bad on Nexus 4. It turns out that there is a screen protector on his Nexus 4's back that actually COVERS the camera. The other two Nexus 4 I bought for myself and my bf also had screen protectors on its back but it was not covering the cameras.... So yeah..
So does a rooted Nexus 4. It's got an LTE chip, and the N4 just got an FCC certification for LTE, so there might even be an official firmware update in the works to turn it on without rooting.
What's it got that the Nexus 4 doesn't have? I'm pretty happy with my 4, which I just got a few months ago. I suppose I'll wait for the 6. After that they're going to have to think of a new name because there's already a Nexus 7...
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[ 2.2 ms ] story [ 305 ms ] threadhttps://play.google.com/store/devices/details/Nexus_5_32GB_B...
https://play.google.com/store/devices/details/Nexus_5_32GB_B...
edit: link: https://play.google.com/store/devices/details?id=nexus_5_whi...
Last Night, I had to lie that I am in the US so I would be allowed to by Remote by 37Signals on my kindle.
Quite ridiculous and annoying.
http://imgur.com/eS8agor
And I agree. The way Google does this with an error page for non serviced locations feels really off. It's not how the web is supposed to work. Not shipping to other countries is bad enough. This is rude.
Google should just put these things on Amazon.
That's why I had to send my sister in the UK money to get my hands on my Nexus 4... annoying, and stupid.
It's not just Africa, either.
At least I know right now that I have to log in all the time to be sure I can safely add items to my cart
If it thinks you're in Montana once, it's probably going to every time. So you'll see exactly what you see now. Heck, maybe this is exactly what they DO do, and it thinks I'm in Washington so I never get a message. :) But for the majority of cases where it can geolocate the country properly, at least to the resolution of US vs not-US, it would be helpful.
Maybe it's only Amazon Fulfillment items that do this?
[1]: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B009ENG6TI/ref=ox_sc_sfl_ti...
e.g. I see "We are not able to ship this item to your default shipping address."
And hypocritical, given they are quick enough to penalise sites which present different content to there crawler than everyone else. Presenting different information by way of adding a warning ("we can not currently supply thsi item to the location you seem to be calling from, please come back later and in the meantime let's have a look at what you could have won...") would be fine, but an error feels like "you can't have one and we don't care".
I'd like to get rid of these stupid borders.
I wonder why they don't/can't order enough.
Guess the store not crashing counts as an improvement...
[1] http://ict.investinluxembourg.lu/ict/paypal
I'm guessing here, but I think there might be some correlation between people who travel internationally a lot and people who buy high-end smartphones. Making it difficult for people traveling internationally to buy apps or to buy devices and have them shipped to their homes isn't exactly smart. I used X11 forwarding over SSH to run a browser on my VPS to make sure they let me order my Nexus 5 in the US while I'm in Germany.
http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec14.html#sec14...
There is the "ncr" workaround for some of their idiotness but it doesn't always work. I was sad to see Bing copy this cancer "feature" as well a few years ago.
1) Friend and I both have nexus devices, both setup in English with Google accounts signed in, both residing in Hong Kong. Friend creates calendar event and sends invite to to me. I get the invite in GMail entirely in Chinese with no translation links in English.
2) Install app that requires access to Google account services. App opens browser and attempts to get account permission. Google.com shows permission granting page entirely in Chinese with no English links to change language. To make things worse, the Yes / No buttons are both blue, preventing even inferring which one is which.
This last case is especially ridiculous. A nexus device, setup in English language, logged into English language Google account, browser on the device logged into Google account, and yet Google.com page displays permissions page in Chinese.
Running a browser remotely in that way can be quite painful. Running Firefox locally you can tell it to use a socks proxy on localhost:1080 after connecting to your VPS with "ssh -D 1080". You may also want to set the about:config setting network.proxy.socks_remote_dns to true.
Or you could use VPN software, but that's more to setup, and you already have ssh access.
Just use ssh -D to set up a socks proxy and use your local browser via your remote VPS. I fail to see how that isn't obvious
ssh -D sounds like a good solution to the problem. ssh is a powerful tool with a lot of options that are well worth learning. Many of these options are not, however, "obvious". If you doing anything with UI, I hope you aren't in the mindset that every every feature is obvious.
Every time I open a page it's like Google randomly picks one (or more) languages out of Swedish, English, German (it /really/ likes German though - also always places me in the middle of Germany when I go to Google Maps) and displays them to me. The worst case I've seen was when they launched the new Google Maps preview and that page header was in Swedish, the body in English and just the button in the middle in German.
I don't understand why would that be, I've got my google account in English, I've got a UK-based address added to it,as well as a UK-based billing address. I don't understand.
Some years ago, I used the workaround of going to www.google.co.uk (google.com would still prioritize Spanish, but other regional versions, like co.uk, would show results in their language), but now it no longer works. No matter if I go to the Swedish, German or Chinese versions, and no matter my Google preferences, I still get results in Spanish.
Sometimes I even use inferior search engines due to this.
Oh well. Apple seems to have no issue with me going to their US store and purchasing for my US address.
It looks to me like LTE on Verizon wouldn't be supported (bands 4 and 13), but technical CDMA should work?
You don't have to deal with this kind of nonsense with GSM carriers so long as you have an unlocked phone you're good to go.
https://play.google.com/store/devices/details?id=nexus_5_whi...
We don't have phones on Google Play.
EDIT: Strike that, it's dropped to 399€, that's still 543$.
I'm not American so I'm not sure, but I think prices in America are always listed before taxes, while they're listed after taxes in Europe.
This makes it still cheaper in the USA than in Europe, but the margin is way smaller.
$349 + 8.75% tax = $380
French price (without tax for companies):
349E - 19.6% tax = 292E = $403
This link shows me both colors as well as 16/32 gb options. https://play.google.com/store/devices/details?id=nexus_5_whi...
I will wait for the next batch then. Thanks.
Good job Google! Much better experience than last year on the Play Store.
It will likely not work on Verizon regardless of the radio, though, because Verizon doesn't want it on their network.
That strikes me as odd. Why would Verizon not want any phone on their network that isn't incompatible or defective so as to cause problems?
I don't know, and whenever I ask people on Reddit and real-life phone people about that, I get vague answers that there is bad blood or that I"m wrong for asking.
Who needs pixel perfection 200 ppi beyond what the human eye can perceive? No one. But the show must go on.
However in most smartphone use cases, that's probably not an issue.
Much preferred. Glad they're following HTC in making an iPhone-class display.
4K, 24", reasonably affordable. When it happens, I won't mind if the desktop display market gets stuck in that rut for awhile.
1. https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=41626
I still don't understand why they only sell this in some EU countries and not others. Friends in the know tell me it's something to do with certification which seems strange inside the EU.
But even if that's the case surely they could just show me the damn page and then tell me they can't ship to my address. That's what Amazon does for some things anyway. At least that way I could look at the damn thing and potentially have it shipped somewhere else.
Probably sessions that people left open and didn't buy.
All models are currently available (72 minutes after launch), but with a "leaves warehouse by 11/8" instead of 11/5 ship date.
When I first went to the play store site, it showed "sold out". Later on, I refreshed the page randomly and it showed the price tag button which lets you order. I tried to order it, but by the time I got to the checkout page it showed my shopping cart as empty. Going back to the front page showed "sold out again".
I waited a while, reloaded once in a while until I saw the price button again, and clicked through really fast to the checkout screen and I was able to purchase one.
Your mileage may vary.
It seems your comment doesn't fit with reality. ;)