Pixel - not the Google phone!

Well, not quite. It's officially called "Pixel, Phone by Google," and the search giant unveiled it Tuesday during a much-hyped event in San Francisco.

The Pixel, available with either a 5-inch or 5.5-inch display, is a grown up Google phone, meant to compete with the top brass of the smartphone world, including Samsung and Apple. It's a sharp strategic shift for Google, which has until now been content with selling phones through its Nexus program. For that, Google farmed out some of the hardware design to other manufacturers -- like LG, Asus, and Huawei -- who put their brands on the phone alongside Nexus.

For tech watchers, the Pixel ends years of speculation about when Google would actually build a premium phone. The rumors started the moment Google bought a tiny mobile software startup called Android in 2005, a move that eventually pits it against Apple's iOS software for the iPhone. It prompted Apple's Steve Jobs to declare he was willing to spend every bit of his company's cash on fighting a "thermonuclear" war to destroy android!

So when Apple announced its own foray into the smartphone market in 2007 with the iPhone, we knew something was missing, an archrival. Coke has Pepsi, the Lakers have the Celtics, Tupac had Biggie. The iPhone needed a worthy competitor, someone even more formidable than Samsung, the world's biggest maker of phones.

That's why a Google phone has been a long time coming. "When we finally decided to do it, everyone was like, 'What took you bozos so long?'" Brian Rakowski, a Google vice president of product management, said in an interview Tuesday.

"If Google does a phone named Pixel, and it's successful, then it makes Pixel successful".