Tell me if you’ve heard this one before: a guy walks into a bar with a prototype phone, and leaves it there. Alright, that’s not the best joke out of the book, but given the fact that it’s true, and it’s happened before, no punchline is really needed when the premise is hilarious in itself. Jamin Barton, a musician that often plays at the 500 Club in San Francisco, happened upon a phone after a gig one night that seemed normal, but wasn’t. It was Google’s upcoming Nexus 4.
Remember back in 2010 when an Apple employee left a prototype iPhone 4 in a bar, which was later discovered by a customer? Of course you do – it was talked about for weeks, dominating the tech headlines each day. Despite all that, it was rumored that another iPhone was lost in the same manner last spring, and now, we have a Google phone joining in on the fun.
When Jamin discovered the phone, he didn’t know anything about it. It wasn’t until he let a regular take a look at it that he found out what it was, and at that point, this customer contacted Google and notified the company of the problem. As Wired reports, Google wasn’t exactly friendly with this discovery. One of the company’s security people, Brian Katz, didn’t instill much faith in either Jamin or this “accomplice”. After a few days of strange happenings, the phone did find its way back to Google, safe and sound.
Google is often known as being a lighthearted company, but when it comes to prototypes of a flagship product going missing, there’s not too much humor to be found. It’s said that the employee responsible for losing the phone was fired – a statement that leads me to believe that this entire thing isn’t just some elaborate hoax by Google. No company willingly wants that kind of publicity.
I wondered it with the iPhone 4G incident and I wonder it again: who on earth can walk around with a prototype product from a major company and be so careless? I couldn’t get drunk enough to make that mistake. Any companies want to take me up on the challenge?