On Monday, Apple marked 10 years since the launch of the first iPhone on January 9, 2007. The smartphone was introduced by Steve Jobs and marked the beginning of Apple's dominance and innovation in the smartphone market.
Sonny Dickson shared a video on YouTube showing the first two iPhone prototypes, Tony Fadell's P1 and Scott Forstall's P2 designs. The two phones were the prototypes for the first iPhone, and both run Apple's Acorn OS, but different competing versions of software.
The video shows two until boot, but to say its feature set is limited is an understatement. The software releases incorporate diagnostic tools and some basic system information.
It appears that Apple had put two teams together to work on the software that would later be implemented in the original iPhone. Tony Fadell's P1 device ran a version of software that was similar to that found on iPods at the time.
The Acorn version had a digital representation of a scroll wheel that would be used to access the system menu 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 to test iPhone prototypes.
[su_youtube url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0eJZH-nkKP8″ width=”640″ height=”380″]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B7o0qA4L4So[/su_youtube]
Ultimately, Apple chose Forstall's P2 version of the iPhone OS Acorn, which used individual icons to interact with the phone, as opposed to a scroll wheel. Essentially, the P1 scroll wheel was a good idea considering Apple had the majority of the market with its iPod at the time, but that didn't mean such an interface could be successfully ported to a phone. It seems that the P2 interface was a success, seeing as how even though a lot has changed, the basic idea would remain the same.
Needless to say, the prototypes shown in the video are just two of many that Apple examined. Indeed, Apple worked on many versions of the first iPhone, with differences in both hardware and software.
