With the iPhone celebrating its 10-year anniversary last week, there have been quite a number of interesting stories highlighting just how impactful Apple’s iconic smartphone has been. While there’s no denying that the iPhone helped create the modern day smartphone market as we know it, it’s just as remarkable that the iPhone has remained the “smartphone to beat” for nearly a decade now.
As time has marched on, we’ve slowly but surely learned more about the process that led to the iPhone’s creation. As is well known now, Steve Jobs during the early iPhone development days tasked two separate teams to come up with varying iPhone designs. One such design was to be based on the iPod’s clickwheel, while the other was designed to be a touchscreen running a variant of OS X. Ultimately, Apple wisely opted to go with the latter design.
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A few days ago, noted hardware leaker Sonny Dickson posted video of what the former iPod-based iPhone UI looked like. For a company that values product secrecy as much as Apple, watching this video provides us with a fascinating glimpse behind the typically locked doors at 1 Infinite Loop.
The video description reads: “Instead of the modern touch-driven interface we now call iOS, it featured an operating system dubbed “Acorn OS” (this was an internal code name, and it is unclear if it would have kept that name if it had been released), which is derived from the acorn shown on boot. It presents an on-screen click wheel, which took up the bottom portion of the screen, and on the other half of the screen, a UI identical to the one found on the beloved iPod, with options such as “Dial,” “SMS,” “Music,” “Contacts” and “Recents,” however lacking a browser option. The interface is interacted with in the same way an iPod would be operated.”
The video can be viewed below.
Just as intriguing, Dickson also put together a video that showcases the iPod-based UI against one of the original OS X-based iOS prototypes from the team led by Scott Forstall. That video can be viewed below.
