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Original iPhone Prototype With iPod Click Wheel Surfaces Online
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This forum is so full of toxic apple hate we have to assume Tim would make such a bad choice.
wow
I am out
wow
I am out
Tim Cook should take a lesson from Steve and make a competition inside apple.
while it may not be exciting, it does stand that they were willing to innovate and be conscience about doing something new or challenging. I can't say the same for the current team(s).
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Is it just me that thinks this might be fake? The video is purposefully dim so you can't see the hardware, the UI could easily be faked. Without any clear pictures of the device running this I am calling BS. This could easily be faked in an app for iphone
Whoever disparaged Apple for not innovating any more want to read this article. Well done Tim. This is what the world's been waiting for. Dig that click wheel, man. It's gonna be BIG!
Am I the only one who thinks that this is a fake? It wouldn't be at all difficult to write something like that (today), run it on a modern iPhone and film it in the dark so that you can't see the hardware.
And when you watch the video the display doesn't entirely seem to respond to the motion of the user's hand.
Is shouting "FAKE!" to me.
And when you watch the video the display doesn't entirely seem to respond to the motion of the user's hand.
Is shouting "FAKE!" to me.
Problem with Scott's loyalty to skeuomorphism is that, while it was a great bridge to help folks relate to all the analogous features on the new tech, he seems not to have recognized that.
He seemed prepared to design cartoony caricatures of things after it was clear that folks wer hot for the product.
His loyalty to an outmoded and no longer necessary concept held back innovating and optimizing the design for the future. (Oh, And it was kinda ugly as well.)
Indeed.
Remember the UI for song search on clickwheel iPods? You had to "dial-in" one character at a time. It was slow, but better than nothing I guess:
Why would you waste a multi-touch screen on emulating a clickwheel? I call ******** on this one.
There are accounts of the original iPod phone prototype, and it was literally an iPod with a phone chipset in it. Physical clickwheel and all. They realized it wasn't feasible, and moved onto "OS X on a multitouch device". There was no in-between like this.
There are accounts of the original iPod phone prototype, and it was literally an iPod with a phone chipset in it. Physical clickwheel and all. They realized it wasn't feasible, and moved onto "OS X on a multitouch device". There was no in-between like this.
It seems plausible to me.
Remember that before the iPhone appeared, Apple was enjoying unprecedented consumer acceptance of their click wheel iPods. It was Apple's easy-to-use UI that distinguished iPods from their clunky competitors in the mp3 player market.
Abandoning that UI must've been a really hard decision. Customers loved it and were already "trained" in how to use it.
So creating UI prototypes to look for potential problems seem like one of the first things they'd do.
Anyone else feel like this is just a custom piece of code written for iOS and being passed off as an original prototype or an alternate OS? It looks like something that could have been put together in a matter of days to this level of functionality.
That's not why Forstall gets "a lot of hate", at all.
He was ousted because he was creating tension inside Apple's teams, to the point that many were about to leave (including Mansfield).
The final nail in his coffin was his reluctance to publicly apologize for Apple Maps, that were clearly at beta stage and not ripe for a (pompous) introduction.
Yeah I remember.Indeed.
Remember the UI for song search on clickwheel iPods? You had to "dial-in" one character at a time. It was slow, but better than nothing I guess:
Every time I searched for something on the Apple TV.
To anyone who thinks this is a fake: please familiarize yourselves with the word prototype.
This is pretty interesting, as it shows one possible path for a UI. Today it looks terrible, but back in the day it probably looked like a better version of WAP.
It's like the difference between gopher and the old WWW.
From a UI point of view, it takes a UI interaction method that people already were familiar with and grafts it onto a phone. That's how normal interface design works, and you know, it was better than the really bad menu navigation buttons that exist today on feature phones.
That said, iPhone 1 was a complete game-changer, as you can see by the fact that every smartphone today is basically using the iPhone UI.
It'd be fascinating to know the decision-making process behind the UI bake-off.
It's like the difference between gopher and the old WWW.
From a UI point of view, it takes a UI interaction method that people already were familiar with and grafts it onto a phone. That's how normal interface design works, and you know, it was better than the really bad menu navigation buttons that exist today on feature phones.
That said, iPhone 1 was a complete game-changer, as you can see by the fact that every smartphone today is basically using the iPhone UI.
It'd be fascinating to know the decision-making process behind the UI bake-off.
Looking at this, it seems that you could actually do a feature-phone with soft buttons and a touchscreen, like the ATV remote. I guess nobody wants to due to the extra cost.
The UI shown in the video was probably displayed on just a touchscreen attached to development boards. Something like the mostly off-the-shelf tablet development system that was used in 2005 to demo the multi-touch beginnings of the iOS GUI:
Case designs were done separately, since no hardware could fit them (yet).
It was even quicker than that, unless we count just talking and thinking about it.
Although Jobs talked with Cingular about doing a phone in early 2005, Apple didn't get serious about development until mid 2005, coincidentally around the time Google bought Android. That's when they started making the iPod based version. (It's also when Apple approached Verizon, with absolutely nothing to show them except a vague idea and some odd marketing ideas. Verizon politely turned them down. Even Cingular didn't sign on for another year.)
The competition between the iPod clickwheel and the OSX touch based version came later in 2005, with the decision taking place near the end of the year. Project Purple 2 ramp up and the development of iOS started at the beginning of 2006.
It was not until mid-2006, about six months later, that Cingular (AT&T) finally signed a contract for the iPhone. They got a multi-year exclusive, partly in return for delaying the carrier's 3G build out, to instead beef up the speed of their 2G EDGE network for the iPhone. (By then most other smartphones had 3G.)
Also in mid 2006, Jobs invited Google's Schmidt onto the Apple board, no doubt partly because he wanted to pull Schmidt away from supporting the Android effort, and partly because Apple needed Google's services.
With Schmidt's help, Apple and Google engineers secretly met over Halloween 2006 to hammer out new APIs so the iPhone could display Google search, maps, etc. (Later, the GPS-less iPhone added Google's 2G/WiFi locating service, and YouTube videos were converted so the iPhone could play them. Jobs' first demo would've been a lot less impressive without Google services.) The Apple engineers were shocked that the Google engineers showed up in costume, btw
By Thanksgiving 2006, iPhone prototypes were still very unstable and at one meeting Jobs softly told his staff that they had no product yet. His unusually quiet tone frightened everyone far more than his regular yelling, and they redoubled their efforts. By mid December they were able to show the Cingular CEO a semi-working model. Here's the hardware test version of iOS from November 2006:
Even though the iPhone still would not be solid enough to produce and sell until mid 2007, Jobs knew that other companies were also working on capacitive touch phones. If he wanted to guarantee credit for being first, he had no choice but to do a public demo before the big mobile phone show in Barcelona that was coming in February 2007.
So, armed with a dozen iPhone prototypes, each able to run just long enough to show one demo section, he cast aside his normal rule of total Apple secrecy and revealed the device in January 2007. (Luckily, competing development was further behind time wise than expected.)
As an aside, knowing that the below 2005 iPod-phone patent application would sooner or later be noticed, Jobs smartly made sure he was the first to mock it during his demo with that rotary dial iPod photo
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Well considering this is all early prototype software and going on while they were trying to figure out how to make it all work. The project was extremely secretive and in the early staged when this "concept" software was out so there isn't going to be a physical phone running it. Most software is done on circuit boards with the hardware components on such a new product, not the actual device itself.
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It still would have been easier at the time....if you're old enough to remember texting was still a pain on phones (pre iphone and T9 input)
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There are trolls a plenty on this thread. Some of which I'm willing to bet we just born around the time iPods were even a thing. So they have no idea.