This is how crazy the first iPhone should look

We all know the classic smartphone design. Big, flat, glossy black and with a touch screen – so far so good. Unsurprisingly, many of today’s phones are still fundamentally based on Apple’s design for the first iPhone.

But as iPhone inventor and technology guru Tony Fadell has now revealed in his book, the first mass-market smartphone should look completely different. Above all, an element borrowed from Apple’s iPod, vaguely reminiscent of a dial on an old telephone, should characterize the look. But then things turned out differently.

Steering wheel instead of touch screen

And there’s a good reason for that: while the idea was original and cool, it wasn’t very practical. According to Fadell, the design simply wouldn’t have worked in everyday life. The fact that the phone had to have a pivot hinge in the middle, with which the front and back could be rotated as desired, does not make things any easier in everyday life and in long-term field tests.

The top half should consist of the screen on one side and a camera with shutter on the other. The bottom, on the other hand, should have the turning wheel for maneuvering already known from the iPod and, on the other hand, a numeric keypad.

In principle, the first iPhone should also be more reminiscent of an iPod with telephone functions than of a completely new device. Because of this, one of the early concepts was largely based on Apple’s music player design. The rotating wheel, a trademark of the iPod, was also taken from this idea.

Not a practical design

This would then require tedious “pinning” through contacts and menus, which is ultimately why this design never got past prototype status. “You couldn’t insert anything because there was no text input,” Fadell recalls.

Still, Steve Jobs was so convinced of the concept that he encouraged and urged the development team at the time to take the iPod’s strengths into account when designing Apple’s first phone. The reason: With the iPod wheel you’ve developed such an intuitive and groundbreaking design, why replace it with a full touch screen?

“We spent weeks working on ideas to create data with the wheel, but it just didn’t work out,” explains Fadell. And yet Jobs didn’t want to give up: “Keep trying!” In the end, the team opted for the classic approach, which we still find on smartphones today.

Tony Fadell details the first iPhone and other secrets from his life as an Apple inventor in his recently published book, “Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making.”

(t-online/arg)