Dabbling in Android as I do, when I recently saw that Google were releasing the new Nexus phone (the Nexus 4) I thought to myself, “hell, why not – it’s nearly Christmas after all and I’ve been good all year”.

So this morning I logged into the Play Store and along with 1000s of other waited, periodically tapping F5 waiting to see the ‘Notify Me’ button change to ‘Add to Cart’. When it did (at about 8:05 am) all hell broke loose. I added the 16GB version of the phone to my cart and then tried to add the ‘bumper case’ – which resulted in a nice error message and notification that my cart was now empty.

Ok, forget the case for now, just get the phone sorted (I can order the case in a day or so when the smoke has settled). I must have tried a dozen times to get to the payment screen. Sometimes the ‘Add to Cart’ button would revert to ‘Notify Me’ and then back again sometimes I got an error when I added the phone to the cart, other times it would be when I clicked on the Go To Checkout button. But then, out of the mists of despair I reached the elusive popup with the buy button! I selected the appropriate delivery and payment details and clicked Buy. My heart sank as once again I was greeted with another error message.

By this time the 16GB version appeared to be sold out and only the 8GB version was available – did I really want that? No, but I thought I’d give it a whirl just for kicks and predictably I was greeted with error after error. Finally the 8GB version was also sold out but just then something odd happened – the ‘Add to Cart’ button appeared on the 16GB version. I added it to my cart, went to the Checkout and clicked the Buy button – only to be greeted with another error.

OK I thought, enough is enough. My Nexus S is plenty good enough for me anyway, I’ll wait for the smoke to clear and get one then…….that’s when I received an email receipt for an 8GB Nexus 4! I accessed my Google wallet account and sure enough, under the pending transactions, was an order for an 8GB version of the phone – not really what I wanted but at least I had one (albeit ‘pending’). A little while later I accessed my wallet again to see if the order had moved from Pending but something stranger greeted me – another order, this time for a 16GB version. Oh dear … looks like I’ve gone from neither model to one of each in a very short space of time.

The order for the 16GB version actually has a time stamp that’s earlier than the 8GB version – even though it arrived in Google Wallet afterwards. All very confusing.

Well, at the moment both orders are Pending so being a realist I can say that I’ve bought either yet, let alone both. if both turn up then I guess I’ll thrown the other one onto EBay and see what happens.

Well that’s a lesson learned for me! I remember watching TV reports of people clammering for Cabbage Patch Kids and thinking “that’s just mental..!”. Well, I’ve now experienced the online version of that and can honestly say I’ll never be doing that again.

Update 14/11/2012: Received an email from Google regarding my multiple orders asking if they were intentional and providing details of how I can cancel unwanted ones. So, in the knowledge that my orders appear to be valid I’ve cancelled the one for the 8GB version – my bank account can breathe easily once more.