Monday, September 17, 2012

What made Apple invent iPhone


The remarkable story of how tech giant Apple, which has been credited for creating the revolutionary iPod and Mactintoch computers, and how it invented its first iconic iPhone, has been finally revealed.

The Samsung case, which ended last month with a resounding victory for Apple, revealed a trove of details about the invention of the world's most popular mobile handset.

According to Slate.com, Apple, which created iPod that revolutionized the music industry, should have been the last company on the planet to try to build something whose explicit purpose was to kill music players.



Yet, Apple's inner circle knew that one day, a phone maker would create a universal device that could make calls, play music and videos, and do everything else, and would ultimately eat the iPod's lunch. Apple's only chance at staving off that future was to invent the iPod killer itself.

When Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone in 2007, he showed off a picture of an iPod with a rotary-phone dialer instead of a click wheel.

A Samsung mobile phone, the X810, used a similar rotating wheel for input, so Apple's Tony Fadell, the engineer who's credited with inventing the first iPod, didn't like the idea.

The company decided to abandon the click-wheel idea and try to build a multi-touch phone.

According to the paper, the iPhone team broke down into two separate, but closely integrated groups -- the guys who were doing the hardware and the guys who were doing the software.

The software team's main job was figuring out a way to make a completely novel interface feel intuitive and natural, and the hardware team, meanwhile, was trying to figure out what the phone would look like.

Documents in the trial revealed some of the many iPhone designs that Apple considered, including thin phones; fat ones; ones with rounded glass on the front and back, and many other designs.

By the spring of 2006, about a year before the iPhone's release, Apple's design chief Jonathan Ive and his team had settled on a design for the iPhone.
According to the paper, their winning prototype looked similar to Apple's 2004-era iPod Mini -- it was a metallic device with rounded sides, what designers referred to as 'extruded' aluminum.

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