See the Nexus phone evolution that brought us a $300 flagship in a pretty infographic

It's been a wild ride with Android's poster child Nexus handset line that started in 2010. The Nexus One,Nexus S and Galaxy rolled in front of our eyes as playground handsets for the pure Google experience, until we finally arrived at the Nexus 4 this year.

2012 will mark a seismic shift in the Nexus line strategy, though, one that pits the business philosophies of Apple and Google directly against each other. 

Google's intent is to offer a lot of handset for the price, as it intends to recoup from mobile search and its Play Store ecosystem, whereas Apple banks on the good old markup.

Still, we are now at a quad-core handset with HD screen and 2 GB of RAM for $299, which is what we would call a revolution, rather than evolution, but for the Darwin-esque development of the Nexus brand you can check out the infographic on the right.