That was fast: earlier this hour, Geekosystem passed along the report from The Next Web and Inquisitr that you could preorder an iPad on Amazon.de, Amazon’s German portal. We went there ourselves, saw that it was indeed still available for sale, and took a screenshot.
But if you revisit those very same URLs from our post and the other two — which were still functioning at around 10:20am EST and directing you to the preorder pages — you’ll find that they now return the text “Ihre Suche nach ergab leider keine Produkttreffer.” In other words: “your search did not match any products.”
Similarly, if you go to an individual page, the buying options that used to be there have been replaced with this message: “Melden Sie sich an, um per E-Mail benachrichtigt zu werden, wenn dieser Artikel verfügbar ist. Diesen Artikel von anderem Anbieter kaufen.” That is: “Sign up to be notified by e-mail when this item is available. Request this item from another seller.”
But that didn’t stop the 64GB iPad with WiFi and UMTS (3G, ish) and the 16GB iPad with WiFi from shooting to the #2 and #3 spots on Amazon.de’s bestseller list for “Elektronik and Foto”:
1) The 64GB model presold that well? At the equivalent of $1160 a pop? Wow.
2) The money probably hasn’t been taken out of their accounts yet anyway, but hopefully, all of those preorderers will get their money back…
Published: Jan 28, 2010 10:59 am