14 DAY TRIAL // On Monday, Apple marked 10 years since the launch of the first iPhone, on January 9, 2007. The smartphone was introduced by the late Steve Jobs and the event marked the start of Apple’s dominance and innovation in the smartphone market.
Sonny Dickson shared a video on YouTube showing the two early iPhone prototypes, Tony Fadell’s P1 and Scott Forstall’s P2 projects. The two phones were the prototypes considered for the first iPhone and they both run Apple’s Acorn OS, but different competing software versions.
The video shows both smartphones booting up, but saying that their feature set is limited is an understatement. The software versions incorporate diagnostics tools and some basic system information.
It appears that Apple had put together two teams to work on the software that would later be implemented in the original iPhone. Tony Fadell’s P1 device ran a software version that was similar to the one found on iPods at the time.
The Acorn version had a digital representation of a scroll wheel that would be used for accessing system menus on the phone. The Forstall 2 version had an interface that combined a more direct touch approach, similar to the SwitchBoard operating system that Apple currently uses on test iPhone prototypes.
Hundreds of prototypes were considered for the original iPhone
Ultimately, Apple went with Forstall’s P2 version of the iPhone Acorn OS, which used individual icons to interact with the phone, compared to a scroll wheel.
Essentially, P1’s scroll wheel was a good idea considering that Apple held the majority of the market with its iPod at the time, but that didn’t mean that such an interface could be successfully ported on a phone. It appears that the P2 interface was a success, seeing how even though much has changed, the basic concept remained the same.
Needless to say, the prototypes featured in the video are just two of the many iterations considered for the original Apple. Indeed, Apple worked on many versions for the first iPhone, with differences in both hardware and software specifications.
Considering that the early iPhone was announced a decade ago, we’re quite curious if Apple will bring significant changes to the iPhone 8 in order to mark this milestone.
