Google Nexus 4 lost, turns up in San Francisco bar last month (nope, this isn’t a joke)

Remember that time when the iPhone prototype was lost and found in a restaurant in Redwood City, California a couple of years back? Well, get ready for a dose of déjà vu, because yet another unreleased device from a popular manufacturer has turned up in yet another public establishment, only this time, Apple’s nowhere to be found. This time around, our friends from Google are at the center of the controversy.

Apparently, the upcoming Nexus 4 — set to be announced this Monday, at Google’s “The Playground is Open” event in the Big Apple — turned up at the 500 Club in San Francisco’s Mission District last month. Jamin Barton, a bartender at the club, discovered the phone as he was closing up shop for the night. After figuring out that it was an unreleased Google phone, the poor fella ended up going through one of the most bizarre experiences a guy could go through to get the phone back into the proper hands.

When he finally connected with the global investigations and intelligence manager at Google, Brian Katz, to give the phone back, Katz offered Barton a free phone (it will likely have a retail value of about $300) if he agreed to keep quiet about the incident and not release photos or discuss the phone with the press until after Monday’s press conference. Mighty nice of them, eh?

Needless to say, Jamin did the right thing. He gave the phone back, sold his photos to Wired, who waited until the weekend before the event to release them for the world to see, along with a video that was taken of the phone booting up, which I’ve thrown in below. Bravo, guys! I like what you did there!

Be sure to read the full account of everything that went down in the source link below. This is definitely one of the funnier things I’ve heard in a while, even with the possibility that it was all just a PR stunt. What are your thoughts?

Source: Wired