“It’s well established that Apple’s iPhone was in the works for a good two years before it became a household name at Macworld 2007, and interestingly enough, the idea to develop a phone in the first place was borne out of Apple’s previous work on tablet prototypes in the early 2000s,” Yoni Heisler reports for iOnApple. “Steve Jobs admitted as much to Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher during an appearance at the 2010 All Things D conference. ‘I’ll tell you a secret. It began with the tablet. I had this idea about having a glass display, a multitouch display you could type on with your fingers. I asked our people about it. And six months later, they came back with this amazing display. And I gave it to one of our really brilliant UI guys. He got [rubber band] scrolling working and some other things, and I thought, ‘My God, we can build a phone with this!’ So we put the tablet aside, and we went to work on the iPhone.'”
“And now, thanks to some digging through some Apple/Samsung court filings, we also have a better grasp as to when Apple’s work on tablet prototypes began,” Heisler reports. “What’s more, I was able to dig up some photos of one of Apple’s early tablet mockups from the early 2000s.”
Read much more, and see many more photos, in the full article here.