Original iPhone Prototype With iPod Click Wheel Surfaces Online

[macduke]

Tony Fadell is the type of person who comes up with a good idea and then can't let it go, even when it's a horrible implementation. This roughly explains why Nest worked out at first—the round interface worked well for that. But it also explains why Nest never went anywhere and he ended up leaving that too: he was stuck in the past and couldn't innovate with new products and ideas. That company was all about that thermostat, and even though they blew through money like crazy and bought Dropcam, they were still the round thermostat company that didn't really have any direction.

 

[TechGeek76]

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.

Point it, this headline is misleading, it's the interface only.

 

[macbookhair]

Acorn OS?

 

[timber]

Ha ha. I was thinking the same think when reading -- that Tim Cook would have released this and said it was magical. BUT I don't think we would be on aCorn OS now. It wouldn't exist anymore. We'd be using BlackBerry 25 or Palm 32 while listening to music on our Microsoft Windows XP music edition iPod.

Android was still coming, looking a lot more like BB

In Europe we would still be using Nokia which in my opinion was a lot better than anything BB ever came up with.

 

[Chupa Chupa]

Android was still coming, looking a lot more like BB

In Europe we would still be using Nokia which in my opinion was a lot better than anything BB ever came up with.

OK, it was tongue in cheek -- no need to get defensive. No one can predict a future, much less one that never happened.

 

[Appleaker]

This would have been an interesting iPod app at the time. It would work even better now with 3D Touch.

 

[usarioclave]

It was not until mid-2006, part way through development, that Cingular (AT&T) finally signed a contract for the iPhone

People forget that without Cingular there would be no iPhone. No other carrier was going to give up that much control, but Cingular was looking for an edge and took a chance. Cingular was bought by AT&T in part because of the iPhone exclusive.

The word was that Apple also got a chunk of subscriber revenue, since the phone was selling at MSRP. I'm not sure if those agreements are still in place; by now they're probably gone.

 

[timber]

OK, it was tongue in cheek -- no need to get defensive. No one can predict a future, much less one that never happened.

I'm not defensive, in fact I think it's good fun to make this kind of predictions.

Would we still get large screen, touch style UIs, just latter?

Some phones were more or less the same size as the original iPhone. The touch part I'm not so sure.

 

[camnchar]

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:

It's nearly the same text entry interface the Nest thermostat has today.

 

[bbbb4b]

I always said, back in the day, that they should have made a phone inside the iPod Mini (the original one that looked like a candy bar style phone already). Just needed a speaker at one end and a mic at the other (and radio)...Presto!

 

[Gorms]

This is legit fascinating! I've always wanted to see the fabled circular wheel iPod prototype.

My word, they really did make the right choice.

 

[4jasontv]

Oh yeah, that click wheel sure was satisfying to use. Has anyone made a music player app that replicates this feel?

 

[MVMNT]

The Onion knew...

 

[Arran]

Oh yeah, that click wheel sure was satisfying to use.

It is indeed.

I just 'revived' the first iPod I ever bought (a 4th gen iPod photo) with a new battery and a 64gb SD card. Its good to have it working again. A breathtakingly simple UI that performs its job beautifully. Love it.

 

[where is it]

Bit odd at 41secs it says Format: Windows?

 

[Arran]

Bit odd at 41secs it says Format: Windows?

You could do that with the old iPods. I think it was in case you wanted to use them in disk mode? I remember changing mine over to mac when I moved off of windows PCs at home.

 

[kdarling]

People forget that without Cingular there would be no iPhone. No other carrier was going to give up that much control, but Cingular was looking for an edge and took a chance. Cingular was bought by AT&T in part because of the iPhone exclusive.

Cingular has said that they didn't give up very much. After all, the biggest procedural change was that Apple wanted to handle all warranty work (easier for the carrier).

Interestingly, Verizon turned Apple down for reasons that later melted away. For instance, the biggest negative was that Apple refused to allow Verizon's sales partners such as Best Buy to carry the device. (Yet nowadays even Walmart and Radio Shack do.) Apple also wouldn't allow a direct subsidy, or carrier insurance.

What most people don't know, is that Apple did continue to approach Verizon for almost a year during 2005-6 (until they signed with Cingular). But midway the ill-fated Apple-Motorola ROKR "iTunes Phone" had come out. Yikes. Combine that with no third party apps, no GPS and no 3G, and an Apple phone would not sound too attractive.

OTOH, I betcha if Apple had ever showed a prototype to Verizon, things might've been quite different today. Consider the fact that AT&T's three year exclusive allowed Android phones years to get an unopposed foothold on all the other US carriers. Biggest goof up Apple ever did, IMO.

The word was that Apple also got a chunk of subscriber revenue, since the phone was selling at MSRP. I'm not sure if those agreements are still in place; by now they're probably gone.

Yep, what Apple got for the first iPhone was the money traditionally set aside each month to subsidize a phone. In other words, Apple was not only getting full retail price, but taking each user's subsidy as well. (AT&T didn't care, since it didn't cost them anything extra.)

Unfortunately for Apple, it wasn't long before many (20% +) iPhones were being unlocked and sold to non-AT&T users. Apple saw no monthly revenue stream from those phones.

For that and other reasons, Apple changed for subsequent iPhones to the usual subsidized sales method of getting a full large amount upfront, and letting the carriers handle the rest.

 

[jonnysods]

Man thank goodness this one hit the cutting room floor!

 

[Zaft]

and when IOS was revealed google **** their pants lol.

Google scrapped android and started over.

 

[SWC]

Yeah I remember.
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.

I don't think it's fake because the software is terrible (it is), I think its fake because they went out of their way to hide what hardware this was running on and various other factors. It's pretty common knowledge that they experimented with the iPod OS. It is 100% for me the shadiness of the video itself.

 

[usarioclave]

Cingular has said that they didn't give up very much. After all, the biggest procedural change was that Apple wanted to handle all warranty work (easier for the carrier).

What they gave up was control over the phone. Before Apple the carriers always had the final say as to the phone look, feel, branding, and applications. With the iPhone that all changed. The carrier name wasn't even on the phone, which was completely unheard of in the mobile space. They didn't have a carrier splash screen. Plus Apple could push updates whenever, assuming that the carriers gave it the OK.

Remember the AT&T/iPhone edge data problems? Probably not...but some of us do.

That's what Apple learned from the ****ed-up ROKR experience: carriers suck. That's one of the problems that Android had; Rubin knew that Android was a carrier-friendly play, and Android suffers because of that to this day.

 

[Johnny907]

Is there a reason none of these photos show the actual unit, just the screen from a dark room? Why would you not photograph that for people who give less of damn about the software and are more curious about the hardware?

Unless this is a fake.

 

[Targets R Us]

I don't think there's a(ny) reason to doubt the video at this point. When I've been involved with our Human Computer Interface (HCI) organization, the first thing they do is create a software-only mockup of the interface to use in testing with a broad spectrum of likely users. The hardware used to run the mockup (or simulation) is sometimes masked from the testers so as to not influence their feedback.

This video could easily have been created to show Apple execs (and others) what they were working on.

-Jeff

 

[petsounds]

It's a real testament to Scott Forstall's design that this seems so...clunky and that the iOS design seems so inevitable. Although Forstall gets a lot of hate for his penchant for skeuomorphism, it's clear from this video alone that he is one of the most important GUI designers in the history of computing.

Forstall was not a designer, he was a software engineer and manager.

 

[Bluestrike2]

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.

That's the thing to remember. We're looking back after nearly a decade of multi-touch smartphone innovation and familiarity.

At the time of the original iPhone's development, multi-touch was still fairly new. There's some limited academic research from the early 90s on the idea of a multi-touch interface, but it wasn't until the early 2000's that it became more of an effort. The iPhone team was, quite literally, making a lot of it up as they worked. Prior to that, the only products launched with multi-touch were large, table-sized devices meant for use by multiple people at one time, such as the DiamondTouch. There would have been very, very little overlap (information and research, use cases, etc.) between that kind of product and a small, consumer device like the iPhone.

It's not surprising that Apple would have considered somehow porting the iPod interface over to a phone. If anything, that UI approach would probably have been favored at the beginning as they started to experiment with how multi-touch inputs would affect UI design simply because they knew that it was already well-liked by consumers and they'd spent years refining it.

The very real flaws, glaringly obvious when we look at these images with the benefit of hindsight, wouldn't have been so obvious back then. If you have a multi-touch interface, forcing people to use a virtualized representation of a physical interface device--the scrollwheel--is pretty clearly an odd approach compared to direct interaction. Truthfully, it's unlikely that Fadell/Forstall clash could have played out much differently than it did in the end. Even if Apple had chosen to somehow try to port the iPod's interface, it would have likely diverged towards what iOS eventually became once more thorough user testing was undertaken.

Anyhow, it's a very interesting look at how the process developed.