So we've come a long way with smartphones and you could definitely see that when i reviewed every single iphone in a row, that's ever been made 1 through 13.. But this this should be very different, because the question of what exactly defines a google phone has changed. Quite a bit over the years, they've been all over the place, but they've also come a long way in a different way. So what is a google phone first of all? Well today, the correct answer would be a pixel, of course right.

But if you ask the same question anywhere from around 2010 to 2015, the correct answer would have been a nexus. A nexus is a google phone, or maybe any number of google play editions. But if we're going all the way back to the beginning, which we are, it started with this the g1, so the g1 was manufactured by htc, and this is going to be a key thing to pay attention to throughout this whole timeline, because until the year 2016, Google has never been the manufacturer, the hardware company that builds the google phone google makes great software and great services, but absolutely has never been a hardware company they've just been out here, making android so before the g1 android was originally built to be an alternate operating System for digital cameras still a great idea by the way uh, but eventually google bought android in 2005.. I think andy rubin at some point called it literally the best deal ever, but there was briefly a prototype called the sooner that was never sold but was manufactured.

Also by htc, based on their excalibur and used to demonstrate and test this new version of an open source, mobile operating system and then by 2008 we had the t-mobile g1. I remember really wanting this phone, but i was on verizon and i was 15, so i couldn't just switch for a phone that looked cool, but it did it looked so cool. It was really a different design from so many of the other phones out. At that time it had a trackball in addition to the touchscreen, which wasn't that weird, because blackberries had those too, but there was also the end, call sleep wake button.

There was a dedicated camera button with a state-of-the-art 3 megapixel camera on the back, but also there were these buttons down here on a chin. That's bent in at the bottom, which is very different and that sliding mechanism for the keyboard, which is still super, springy and very satisfying, was always pretty unique, even at a time where lots of phones had springs and hinges. And, of course, on top of all of that, it was running android version, one on 192 megabytes of ram and a 320 by 480 display now being different, isn't always necessarily good right. This phone definitely got mixed reviews when it dropped.

You know the low contrast screen. Wasn't amazing, there was no headphone jack, so you needed an adapter for this proprietary mini usb port to plug in headphones. But this google phone was all about android. It was all about the software and that's what made it different from the blackberries or palm trios, or even the original iphone that was out at this time.

That's what the g1 was all about, so this phone had to come out for the rest of what we're talking about today to even exist, but what most people think of when they think of the first ever google phone? Is this the nexus one? So, right off the bat, this phone was a flagship. I remember it was a huge deal that it launched with a one gigahertz processor that was a barrier we were approaching at the time it had a relatively large 3.7 inch display and a higher 800 by 480 resolution and beyond all the new power in the big Screen there is now multi-touch capability, so the most memorable feature you might remember about this phone was the live wallpaper behind all your icons and new widgets. I feel like every video on this phone had the live wallpaper with the moving colors and you could just touch a bunch of different spots and they'd pop up. Oh and it had a trackball again so clearly, google liked that as much as i did, there were some other things too, like the back popped off battery removable.

This phone also launched back this early with google goggles, which let you id things through the camera. That's a long time to be doing that and also it launched with the android market, which was an early first version of what we now know as google play store. So a lot of things happening on the nexus one, but i think really. This is the phone that set the tone for me from what i expect a google phone to be, which is a flagship, a very capable flagship phone but asterisk.

This phone is again built by htc. You can see the little badge at the bottom here and so at this point, htc is building plenty of other great phones, but they've also collaborated with google on this one. So we get an htc build. It's pretty dense, it's made of metal.

It also has a spot for a micro sd card slot to expand memory. Alongside that removable battery, there is some resemblance to some other htc phones that came out around the time and chief among them was the htc desire. But with some google specific adjustments like the capacitive button layout below the screen, was just for nexus one and the trackball, which also lit up as a notification light was just for nexus one. So this one was sick, weird fact, though, it was discontinued completely after six months, you know, didn't really get any promo from carriers was kind of trying to be sold online only and it was just over after half a year.

So then we moved on. So what did we get after nexus? One? We got nexus s and this one was made by samsung, so this launched right around the same time as their first ever samsung galaxy s, hence the name, so those phones were built. Similarly, but again, this one was customized a bit for the google experience, and so now that we have a sequel. This is the first time we're really thinking about the question.

What is a nexus? What is a google phone supposed to be? There were also some curious things about this phone, like it had a slightly curved four inch display that wrapped a little bit. I guess around your face or felt more natural in the hand, sort of sure it was also one of the first ever phones with nfc, which would of course be the foundation later to android pay, and it's the first google phone with a selfie camera. It was a vga resolution, selfie camera, but it was still a selfie camera. This phone launched with android gingerbread, which was one of the first versions.

It was the first version to have a darker aesthetic, not quite hollow, but definitely shades of the night mode. We have today and a screen off animation, also one of the coolest most memorable things about this phone. Look like a crt tv. Turning off it's the little things, but really at this point nexus is the phone with the most google software, it's the pure android phone.

So it doesn't have any bloatware it doesn't have. Any modifications doesn't have any skin like you might find on the samsung version or an htc or motorola phone. It's the google software phone so the next year in 2011 we got the galaxy nexus. So there's an even more obvious collab between google and samsung.

We all know about galaxy s. This was a nexus again made by samsung, so it's the galaxy nexus and as a verizon customer, this was the first nexus i was able to get and it was also the first and only phone i've ever lined up outside of a store and waited for. Then i proceeded to make eight videos on it. But again this was a really interesting phone as a google phone, so it had a much larger 4.65 inch, still curved 720p hd oled display and it had a better 5 megapixel rear camera.

On the back with instant shutter, it still had a headphone jack and it still had an easily removable battery. Remember those days when you could just pop out the battery and drop in another one two seconds later and be at 100, but now as a nexus. This phone launches with stock android 4.0 ice cream sandwich the holo os the physical buttons are gone long before the iphone dropped, their home button and android is now entirely doing. On-Screen navigation and, like i mentioned this phone is in stores, so i got it out of verizon store.

Now it still wasn't. A huge seller. Nexuses were still for android enthusiasts, but yeah i was in the thick of it. I remember i had custom roms custom kernels on this phone.

I overclocked this phone. I was having a good time the galaxy nexus, but things were about to change, so i'm going to skip the beloved nexus 7 tablet and the not so beloved nexus q media player. That technically came up next they were nexuses, but they weren't, google phones. There was also a motorola zoom tablet that i loved back in the day.

That was succeeded by a nexus 10, but the next nexus phone was the nexus 4.. So now we've moved on to a google phone made by lg, so this phone was interesting. It sort of took a step back from being a flagship on the shelf of a carrier, store and went back to being a great deal that you could get online. So we have this unique flat: glass design with no camera bump and a super unique dot pattern underneath that you could see when the light hit it a certain way.

It had a slot speaker around the back, which is an interesting choice, but at least you could cup your hand around it and hear it better at the front. But of course now, with this glass design, it becomes the first nexus that supports wireless charging. But the back is no longer removable. This phone dropped for 299, which in 2012 yep was a good deal, although that was the base 8 gig model, so you could spring for the upgraded 16 roomy 16 gigs of memory for 349 bucks um.

It was lacking lte at the time, which was a bit much, but overall the phone was pretty well liked. So now, what's a google phone uh, a well-specced competitive stock, android phone for enthusiasts, i guess well nexus 5 - was built by lg again this time loosely based off of the lg g2. But this was a design i really liked. It was understated.

Had some contrasting black and white hardware, i called it the panda phone because who else did a white earpiece like this? Nobody, but honestly the rest of the phone was pretty forgettable. They got up to a flagship, spec again snapdragon 800, with two gigs of ram 1080p display, but i was pretty unimpressed by the camera. It did make hangouts the default text messaging app. But if you know anything about google messaging apps yeah that wouldn't last long, i think probably the most significant thing that came from the nexus 5 was a little extra focus on the stock.

Google now launcher. So these phones have always shipped with aosp, which is android open source project. It's basically just a version of android that you get when you download it straight from google stock blank, nothing extra added, but now google's actually starting to add a little bit of its own special sauce on top of android when it ships it with a nexus phone. So this shipped with android 4.4 kitkat, one of the two candy themed collabs, but the launcher had google now built in where you could swipe over from the home screen, and it would give you these cards and the google assistant would show you this information on the Cards that it predicted would be useful to you before.

You would even ask for it so stuff, like the weather at a destination you're about to fly to or the traffic on your way to work before you leave in the morning really smart stuff. So nexus 5 was an uninspiring piece of hardware. Pretty simple and basic definitely was the beginning of seeing some of google leaning into being a smarter phone than your typical smartphone. Also shout out to the red version of this guy.

That came out a few months after launch that was so bright that it literally over saturated, pretty much everyone's camera. I remember it was impossible to make this phone look, the actual red that it shipped on video, but it completed the trifecta of the mkbhd edition smartphone colors, so that was very nice. Okay, here comes 2014 and here comes shamu, the most unnecessarily massive nexus of all time now made by motorola. So, okay, at this point, is there any theme to who makes the nexus phone each year i mean it feels like they just offer up a two-year contract.

Every time and see who wants to sign, allegedly, they were really close to working with huawei on this year's phone, but had to scrap it at the last second. So, okay, we got nexus 6, just based loosely around the 2nd gen moto x, but just way bigger and it is huge. It's got a massive, nearly 6 inch 1440p display, flanked by stereo front-facing speakers and the bezels, and you know we have big screens nowadays, but this was also in the days of the 16x9 aspect ratio. So it's super wide too just huge in the hand not to jump ahead too much, but nexus 6 is actually bigger and wider than the pixel 6..

So huge display huge 3200 milliamp hour battery with motorola's turbo charging huge new 13 megapixel camera, with a huge new ring flash around it and huge new flagship, specs snapdragon 805, three gigs of ram and up to 64 gigs of storage and android 5.0 lollipop. But along with all these insane, specs was an insane price for the time so nexus. 6 cost 649 for the base, 32 gig version and a whopping 700 bucks for the 64.. So it was not only big, but it had the biggest price tag of any google phone yet, especially coming off the back of the more competitive nexus, 4 and 5.

fun fact: the internal code name of this phone when they were developing it shamu the orca, the Whale see everyone knew it was big, but maybe the most sneaky important feature of the nexus 6 came in the camera, so this was the first ever google phone to launch with hdr plus didn't seem like a huge deal at the time. It was just maybe one more feature in the camera, but it was combining multiple frames all together in a quick shot to bring in more dynamic range and notoriously took a lot of processing power. So hdr plus was just an option that you had to turn on to get that extra latitude, but that right there that was an inflection point for smartphone cameras in general i mean nowadays, if you don't have hdr you're, not really doing it right, but just the Fact that we take for granted now one single shutter press information from several different frames, all get processed and smartly blended together, big moment there. So then nexus 9.

You were great nexus player, definitely not great, but then in 2015 we got two new nexus phones at once. We got the 5x made by lg and the nexus 6p made by huawei okay, so the nexus 5x, as the name suggests, was a bit of an upgrade from the nexus 5.. It added a fingerprint reader on the back, updated specs, bigger battery switched to usb type c, all the classics. It did also have boot loop issues that thankfully never affected mine, but that phone was 379.

Then, at the same time we get this all metal jacket nexus. 6P p for premium, probably, but this was an all metal, build with a camera visor at the top. It had the flat sides, which we still know today as premium the ridged power button, the front-facing speakers and the highest end chip and hdr got even better. This one had a stellar.

Camera 6p was pretty universally praised, as literally one of the best, if not the best, android phones on the planet, this one sold for 4.99, so google, you just made two different nexuses. At the same time, nexuses nexi, you made two of them at once right. One of them cheaper, one of them more expensive, one of them budget, one of them contender for phone of the year very premium, and so this is usually what you see from companies that are trying to offer two different options for two different customers. It's what you get while you're, trying to appeal to a broader variety of the masses, which is an interesting move and then that's the last we ever saw of nexus so enter google pixel.

I just want to say, as a video enthusiast, i love the word pixel as a name for a phone, but that is a new name, so we've had nexus and nexus up. Until this point we could think of as the google software phone right. We had all the samsungs and htc's and motorolas and huawei's of the world making all their own phones, but the google version with the nexus name would be stock android, quick updates straight from google. There was also a brief stint of google play edition phones in 2013 to 2014 that combined the hardware of the best phones in the world with google's stock software.

Does anyone else remember these? I love these phones. There was a google play edition, samsung galaxy s4. It was amazing there was a sony, xperia z ultra. There was a google play edition, htc one m8, honestly, some of the best phones ever, but this is a brand new thing.

This is pixel, it's not nexus! So why the rebrand? Why the new name? Well? There's a bunch of different correct answers. I think to this, but basically this is the first phone that's designed and built by google. So there's your google logo down there. It's the first iteration of this new two-tone design, i mean internally, they still had some help, but this would be considered the first real google phone, but also a big part of what makes pixel next level is how they really started, leaning into it being a particularly Smart smartphone, so it already had that google launcher and the clean look but we're drifting further away from aosp.

This is not the exact version of android you'd get straight from google. This is now like the google skin on top of android, so it's the first android phone with the google assistant built in and it's got the camera again taking pretty big leaps forward, thanks to hdr plus continuing to get better - and i just remember seeing this announcement And getting really optimistic about the future of competition, because surely, if we have the iphones of the world where apple controls the hardware, the software, the chip, the whole everything was made by apple to work perfectly together, then surely this is the beginning of google doing their Best version of the same thing you know so: google pixel 2, i think, was peak pixel and that's at least in two ways. Right with that camera and with that two-tone design, i love a good panda phone already or stormtrooper. Whatever you want to call it.

We saw hints of this with the nexus 6p, but google is now just full-on, embracing the two different finishes on the back by contrasting them with black and white, and then the colored power button wow. What a great idea for just a little splash of color a little accent on the side, but there were a few other notable things here. They got rid of the headphone jack. They did have.

Some blue shift display controversy on the xl version, which used the new lg p led, and i even made a video a few months after launch about why. I don't use the pixel anymore because of slowing down issues with the software over time. But what the pixel 2 was really famous for was this single camera, so it had a new 12.2 megapixel sensor in there and featured the latest and greatest from google's camera app, their hdr plus and their multi-fame processing, and this phone just kicked out incredible photos. It leapfrogged over everything else out.

It had excellent detail, sharpness, dynamic range, shutter, speed, focus, everything and the videos it took weren't, even that good. But the photos were just so good that this was basically universally praised when it came out as the best smartphone camera of all time, but also at this point i think it's worth talking about sales. So this one comes out google's selling three to five million pixels per year, which is nice right, but at the same time you know apple selling, 200 million phones a year, samsung selling 300 million phones a year. So, even with this incredible world-class camera, great reviews enthusiasts loving it great software.

It's not a lot of people buying it. So pixel 3 comes out in 2018 and every bit of it feels just like a refinement on the pixel 2, which is great for people who love the pixel 2. But the minor improvement alone probably isn't going to spike sales, as you can imagine, and there's also regular and an xl version of every pixel since the first one, but this one's xl came with a super duper alpha omega bathtub notch up at the top. At this point, i think we can say it's the deepest notch.

We've ever seen in a phone. It did have both a regular and ultra wide selfie camera up at the front on either side of the earpiece front-facing speaker. So honestly, i loved that extra ultra wide selfie camera on the xl, but nobody really loved the notch. There was an old google tweet, basically trying to justify it by saying: oh, don't worry, the notch to display ratio is actually less than many of our top competitors.

It's like yeah - that's probably true, but also so would this notch, but that doesn't make it good either way. Aside from that minor tweaks, overall refinement of the build materials, ip68 water resistance. Finally, up from ip67 wireless charging gets added here. Night sight is added to the camera app, but basically the same revolutionary camera as last year and overall, pretty solid update, doesn't really move the needle.

You know it did move the needle, though the pixel 3, a this phone shifted things for google, so halfway through 2019. At google i o they announced a budget version of the pixel, it's a 3a and a 3a xl starting at 399, which is half the price that the pixel 3 started at. So it has all the same software smarts, all the stuff that made pixel enthusiasts love the phones but made a budget version with a lower powered. Internals polycarbonate, instead of metal and glass, still has great battery life in the same world-class camera that put the pixel on the map, for so many people and it was a hit.

Basically from the moment this phone was released. It was most of the pixel sales and so there's some upside and some downside to this level of visibility. The upside obviously, is there's now more people seeing and using these phones and google assistant and all this great stuff and the camera. But now the most successful version of this product is the cheap one, which means that, when people think of what is a google phone, what is a pixel, they think of it as the cheap phone that takes good pictures.

They're, not thinking of the fast one or the high-end one. It's the cheap phone with the good pictures. Pixel 4 came out after that and honestly felt like a slight misstep. It launched again starting at 800 bucks they're trying the flagship thing again, but there were a bunch of quirky weird features that either didn't really make sense or didn't pan out the way google was probably hoping now again it had the same, a plus camera as the Pixel 2, but it's been two years now, so the rest of the world is starting to catch up and it's not so unanimous anymore, and it was a bit short on battery life and with the addition of a second rear camera.

For the first time, they chose a telephoto instead of a much more popular and useful ultra wide, even though they talked a lot about the software super res zoom and not needing a telephoto. Anyway, it was the solely radar array up front. That was an interesting idea with a ton of cool demos and other products, but really turned out to draw a lot of power and ultimately not have the functionality in a phone that people were looking for and it would get mixed in a year. So pixel 4 stepped back from being one of the best phones out period to being genuinely pretty hard to recommend.

I mean not. A lot of people bought this phone. The sales figures say there was about 2 million sales of pixel 4 in the first six months. Interestingly, my review of the pixel 4 got 4.8 million views in the first six months.

So a lot of attention, just not a lot of people buying the phone and that's until pixel 4a came out. So naturally, google followed up the successful pixel 3a budget, king with a pixel 4a, and they followed the same formula with a lot of the same stuff that people liked about the 3a same camera, again polycarbonate two-tone design. But this year the materials were even better a little more textured polycarbonate. The screen was fantastic, especially for the price they crushed.

It plus they even lowered the price to start at 349, so to no one's surprise following the same formula, got them a lot of people to really love pixel 4a. So, okay, at this point, it feels like google sort of settled into something with the pixel right got: pixel 3 pixel 3a pixel, 4 pixel 4a disappointing flagship, smash, hit budget phone, disappointing, flagship, smash hit budget phone, and so, if you keep going down this path, you Continue to cement pixel as a budget phone, maybe the rest of it kind of fades into obscurity, and it even kind of felt like the design was slowly getting more generic and plain the two-tone is kind of gone. Even the colored power button is a bit more muted. It's succumbed to the pressures of the industry.

The back fingerprint reader is gone. The headphone jack is gone so this google phone this, this pixel has basically just become uh, not that impressive hardware wise, but really incredible. Like silo for google to demonstrate all of their machine learning and their software and ai, and that's not something that's going to sell a whole ton, i mean enthusiasts, will love it, but it doesn't even let them reach their max potential with that either they're a little Limited by whatever the latest off-the-shelf qualcomm chip is capable of or designed for so this spoiler alert is right around when they started making some serious progress on something new in the background. So this is why pixel 5 and 5a felt kind of like placeholder phones.

Pixel 5. Here is a 700 flagship, so relatively normal price, but there's no xl version just one size, there's no higher capacity, storage versions, just a single 128 gig non-expandable spec, snapdragon, 765 g. Just an off-the-shelf upper mid-range chip, that's it it's just it's here! It's a phone! It's like the it's like the blank canvas. 2020 of phones like oh you've, got a corner cut out for the selfie camera.

So does everybody else? It's got wireless charging. It's got! No headphone jack - it's like we've seen this shell before well, maybe not with the soft touch on top of metal, but inside is where all that software magic is still happening, that all the enthusiasts who love the pixel still care deeply about all that's still in there. So that's how most reviews, including my own, looked at the pixel 5. decent if underwhelming hardware, but android 11, is better than ever.

Google assistant is improving on these incredibly useful pixel exclusive features on top of aosp, like assistant screening spam calls, and it's once again. Basically, the same camera stack as the pixel 2, but computational photography still brings out the best of this hardware and it is still one of the best photo takers in the industry. Then pixel 5a drops almost a year later again with one spec and one size, and it is very, very, very, very very similar to the pixel 4a 5g from the year before. But predictably, people like a big screen and a big battery and a big camera performer for a low price.

So this was again the winner, but this whole time kind of in the background, some of it because there's always rumors of things in the tech industry. But some of it because it was truly new - was rumors of google working on a phone that is even more of a google phone than before and google's pretty bad at containing leaks. So a lot of that stuff got out and they just straight up, confirmed it, and so after many teasers and pre-released information and leaks, it finally arrived 2021's pixel 6.. This is now the apex of being the most google phone ever.

Finally, i actually remember being in some meetings and briefings with some google employees before this phone came out, they're showing it to me, and they all kind of have this smirk on their face. Like yeah, we finally did it. We really made a google phone this time, because now this one has a google design, google software and a google designed chip called tensor and so kind of like how the name changed from nexus to pixel when they finally started doing the design themselves. They've definitely changed up the design here with this camera bar at this beginning of them designing their own silicon and the benefits of the new silicon with the dedicated machine learning accelerators has been very real, both with the photo and video processing now and speech to text Things like that, the rest of the phone is also now pretty high end across the board, mostly not quite bleeding edge.

But you add, the larger higher resolution. High refresh rate displays faster charging more ram and a suite of all new, much larger camera sensors featuring a massive main sensor. So then it does start to feel like a pretty big upgrade. The most impressive thing about this phone, though, might just be how much effort google now is putting in to making sure the world knows that this is a flagship.

I mean all the advertising spend all the effort getting this in front of people's eyes. This is a flagship and it's a google flagship and it's a good one. That's what they want us all to think now, from some conversations i've had with people at google. They were working on tensor for a long time and they actually wanted to have this out earlier.

They're, actually planning on pixel 5 being the first phone with tensor. But then, with covid and supply chain issues and a bunch of things getting in the way at the last second, they kind of had to bail on that, but they still wanted to drop a new phone, so they just put a snapdragon 765 g in it shipped. It called it a day and kept putting their heads down for pixel 6., so it is out now and while they're definitely trying to be flagship, flagship, flagship, they're, also, definitely not going to shy away from the proven formula of making a pixel 6a. I would totally expect to see that sometime soon, probably going to look a lot like this, but cheaper materials it'll come out.

It'll probably also do really well, but i think now, if you revisit the question one last time of what is a google phone, we see. Google trying to push an answer on us, which is it's a flagship phone. It's genuine option and it's got a lot of good stuff and that's where we stand today: 13 years of google trying to make a smartphone and going from the g1 to the nexus one to the pixel one and the merging from uh from defining a google phone. As the phone made by another manufacturer with the google software on it alongside another version that has some skin to being a google play editions to being the nexus designed by google all the way up now to the pixel, where all the way top to bottom, you Pretty much have google stuff, so the tensor phone is the beginning of the new definition looking forward for what is a google phone and we'll continue to see that evolve over time from here either way, that's pretty much it definitely.

Let me know what other lines of phones should. I look at there's a lot of other options. There's the galaxy s line, there's the oneplus line, a bunch of others leave it in the comments section below under that like button thanks for watching thanks for subscribing catch you in the next one peace.