It looks like the curtain is slowly coming down on Google’s flagship Nexus 4 handset, with the 16GB version of the popular device on Monday showing as ‘sold out’ on the US Google Play store. The 8GB version sold out at the start of the month.
Of course, the “we’re out of inventory, please check back soon” message doesn’t rule out the possibility that new stock will come in, but recent price cuts for the handset make it look very much like a stock-clearance move prior to the launch of the expected Nexus 5.
The timing looks about right too – the Nexus 4 hit the market in November last year, while its predecessors, the Nexus S and Galaxy Nexus, were also both released at the tail end of the year (December 2010 and November 2011, respectively).
In addition, a report from the Australia-based Ausdroid site over the weekend said Google’s new phone will be announced on October 14, though the site didn’t name the source of its information.
It’s widely believed the new handset is being manufactured by LG – also the maker of the Nexus 4 – despite LG’s vice president appearing to claim earlier this year that the company was done with building Nexus devices.
The current Nexus 4 smartphone launched in November last year sporting a 4.7-inch display with a 1280 x 768 resolution, a Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 Pro processor, an 8-megapixel rear camera and 1.3-megapixel front one, and 2GB of RAM. The new model is rumored to be based on LG’s new G2 flagship smartphone, and come with a larger display, Snapdragon 800 processor and LTE support.
Google itself has remained tight-lipped about Nexus 4 successor, although it seemed to make an early appearance a couple of weeks ago when it apparently turned up in a Google video promoting the next version of its Android operating system, 4.4 KitKat. In a short piece documenting the unveiling of a KitKat-esque statue on the company’s Mountain View campus, we get a glimpse of a guy holding what appears to be the Nexus 5. Google pulled the video when word got out about the boo-boo.
