Galaxy Nexus - UK stock and pricing update

While we've finally sourced units for review, our inquiries on stock levels and pricing of the Galaxy Nexus are far from over. Yesterday was the launch day and while many stores didn't have devices for sale, there was quite a lot happening at places such as Phones 4U Oxford Street, where Samsung laid on a free breakfast, gave out vouchers and customers could buy a phone off-contract for £529.

Today things got a little better, but also went downhill ever so slightly. Stock landed in most of O2's stores and more Phones 4U branches got hold of devices to sell.

However, if you visited Phones 4U today with £529 in hand, you would have left disappointed. We were contacted by multitudes of our community members and followers on Twitter and informed that Phones 4U had hiked their prices on the handset-only option by £100, in some stores they were also asking the customer to also pay for a mandatory £10 top-up fee to deter 'box-breaking'.

This obviously hasn't gone down particularly well, so we took up the cause and have been in contact with Phones 4U to clarify the situation.

Long story short, P4U were seeing high levels of customers choosing to go handset-only and as a retailer primarily of contract handsets, they took the decision to increase the simfree cost of the devices.

The good news is that following our discussions with them and other customer feedback, Phones 4U have contacted us this afternoon to assured us that the decision is being reversed. From tomorrow stores will revert to selling the handset at the original price  

Additionally, if you paid £629 today, you can contact Phones 4U's Customer Relations team and they'll credit you the £100.  

We're not going to blow our own horns here, we're sure we weren't the only outlet in contact with Phones 4U about the change, but it just goes to show that customer feedback can make a difference.

So, next time things go awry, feel free to poke Paul or myself via Twitter, or let us know via the forums what's happening. We can't make any promises, but we can at least try to let vendors, networks and retailers know how you feel