I also received a back-order notice from Google. I'm not going to do anything rash like cancel my phone. I still want the device, and I don't think that allowing back-orders is a bad thing. Really I think everyone should be able to place an order to wait in line for their phone. What upsets me is that they took 48 hours to tell me my phone was back-ordered. I find it hard to believe that the orders aren't handled automatically, checked against a database to know that they had this many orders and they have this many phones in stock. They had to know they had sold more phones than they had. Even if they were counting on several orders being canceled, I would be a lot happier now if they had said upfront that my order was back-ordered. Then if by some miracle someone cancelled their order and I received my device I would be ecstatic rather than upset.
If Google wants to change the way people by cell phones they really need to work on their store, server crashes are unacceptable for a company with as big of a web presence as Google. Offer preorders so that there is not such a huge load on their servers, and they have an indication of the popularity of the device. Have much faster processeing, in a world where amazon can get almost everything to your house the next day and you can walk into any carrier and walk out with a phone immediately 2 days to process the order before shipping is unacceptable. Finally and this is the biggest thing they need to work on communication and customer service. So much of the anger around here is because no one knows what is going on with their device. Was my order successful? When will my phone ship? When will the next batch be available? Is the next batch really 3 weeks out? how can that be possible?
Anyway I'm done ranting but I really felt like I had to do it.