The iPhone started life as a “Safari Pad”?
The New York Times is reporting that the iPhone started its life out as a “Safari Pad”. An Internet tablet if you will. Once Steve Jobs saw it, he used his panache and morphed it into an iPhone. The author also goes on to say that when he spoke to Steve Jobs at the recent MacWorld in January, he asked if there would be a larger form-factor iPod touch device. Steve Jobs replied,
“I can’t talk about unannounced products.”
I would personally love a tablet sized device that had Wi-Fi and a data connection a-la Amazon’s Kindle. What is in the future for Apple?
March 4th, 2008 at 7:08 am
Actually, this fits with a Wired story from way back - the touch screen work was definitely just toying around with features for OS X originally.
March 4th, 2008 at 7:49 am
Nice story. That was my understanding as well, based on Wired and other comments; that Apple had a working tablet but Jobs never thought it would be a consumer-successful product and so, when Apple went phase 2 on their phone, sucked the tablet ideas into what became the iPhone.
Does kinda make you lust for an iTablet, though. I don’t know if it would be a Kindle-kind of device, but it would be the ultimate digital comic book reader