“Remember back in the day when Apple and Google were all chummy? Back when the original iPhone was released in 2007, and Google wasn’t in the smartphone business? That all changed once Google betrayed Apple’s trust and launched the Android operating system, and ever since then Google has held the stance that they never copied the iPhone,” Buster Heine reports for Cult of Mac. “It’s hard to prove that a company wasn’t thinking about something, but newly released designs of Google’s original concept phone from 2006 show that Google wasn’t even considering the creation of a touchscreen smartphone back when the iPhone was unveiled, so they stole Apple’s designs instead once they saw them.”
“Google went to the carriers with drawings of their concept phone in an effort to increase the use of Google’s mobile services in exchange for providing carriers with ‘low acquisition cost, high-end data customers,'” Heine reports. “Considering it was a phone in 2006, the Google Concept Phone looks great. I would have taken it over the Nokia 3100 I was rocking in the Philippines at that time, but it looks a lot like a Blackberry, and nothing like an iPhone.”
Read more in the full article here.
Chris Ziegler reports for The Verge, “At that time, touchscreen support wasn’t a requirement — in fact, the baseline specs required two soft menu keys, indicating that touchscreens weren’t really in the plan at all.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Bespectacled Mole.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “John” for the heads up.]