IPod-based iPhone Prototype Revealed in Leaked Video

  • by Nick Cohen
  • in Industry
  • — Jan 9, 2017
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A Sonny Dickson uploaded them online and show us an iPhone prototype that has a click wheel touchscreen.

Apple's first iPhone reverberated through the tech world with its 3.5-inch touchscreen with multitouch technology for stylus-free operation, its 2-Megapixel onboard camera and its 16GB built-in memory. The author of the blog points to an old 2006 Apple patent which revealed a multi-touch device with optional click wheel to interact with its software interface.

Sonny Dickson has images and video of what he claims is the iPod-based interface-including a gnarly-looking, on-screen click wheel-that nearly beat out iOS for the iPhone. What's interesting here is that the interface uses an iPod click wheel to browse through and open menus.

The prototype had a menu display in the top half, just like early version of the iPod, and a black strip in the middle with buttons for rewind, menu, play/pause and fast forward.

Its operating system "Acorn OS" used a click wheel which when touched and "spinned" let the user navigate the phone.

Not much else is known about the device, apart from the fact that it differs heavily from the iPhone we know today, and that very few units running "Acorn OS" exist, with majority likely being destroyed by Apple, a company in which there is a specific job role in relation to the destruction of prototypes.

Steve Jobs originally placed Tony Fadell and Scott Forstall in a competition to make the best mobile phone operating system for the iPhone. Forstall's team won, and it appears that today's shared prototype is a bygone leftover of the losing side's work.

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