Google’s motto for its latest line of phones—the Pixels unveiled on Tuesday—may be “if at first you don’t succeed, try, try and try again.”
The Pixels are the first phones carrying only the Google brand, as opposed to Nexus phones that were co-branded with Google and a manufacturing partner like Huawei. But the new phones—the first to be designed solely by Google—follow numerous other unsuccessful stabs at phones going back to 2010. Aside from the Nexus line, there was Google’s two-year effort at owning smartphone maker Motorola Mobility, now part of Lenovo.