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If like me, you were ready yesterday to order your Nexus 6 and were patiently waiting on the Nexus 6 Play Store listing while constantly hitting refresh. Then you would have very quickly noticed that the device went from ‘Coming Soon’ to ‘Out of Stock’. This seemed to happen almost instantaneously with no transition between the two. Although users did report being able to buy the new Nexus smartphone, the reports were very thin compared to what would be expected. To add to this, strangely, reports throughout the day kept coming in that they had managed to buy the device even after it was listed as sold out.
Well it is now starting to emerge as to why this might have happened. The obvious explanation is so many people simply logged on and all bought the device exactly at the same time and as such sold out. The problem with this, is that it was simply too quick. Almost, unnaturally quick. Also, chances are if that was the case we would have seen similar overloads and 404 errors like we saw at the start of the week with the OnePlus One sale. Of course Google’s servers would no doubt of dealt with the user load better than OnePlus but that said, there would have been some evidence.
Well, a report this morning by Mobilesyrup offers some interesting insight. According to the report the sheer majority of the Nexus 6 devices are being kept back for carrier sales. Yes, it seems Google were only offering a fraction of the devices as direct-to-public and instead the carriers have all reserved the main bulk. As all four carriers are lined up to sell the Nexus 6, Google seems to have opted to go the carrier route then offer sufficient availability themselves at launch. Again according to the report this use of carrier-exclusivity seems to be intentional by Google as they are looking to adopt an almost ‘carrier-only’ future for the Nexus 6. This is anticipated to be based on how the adoption of sales of the previous Nexus 4 and 5 occurred. As such there are two real points you can take from this news. Firstly, if you are that desperate to get hold of one then it is still worth monitoring the Play Store. As the suggestion is that Google are periodically letting a few go at a time and as such you never know and you could be lucky. Secondly, you will be able to buy a Nexus 6 in the near future although it will almost certainly be via one of the carriers.