An interesting story on Wired describes some of the process that Apple went through to create the iPhone. It’s hard to know exactly how reliable all the information is, but one paragraph struck a chord– the description of the pre-iPhone iPhone.

From Wired:
Jobs refused to use someone else’s software. They built a prototype of a phone, embedded on an iPod, that used the clickwheel as a dialer, but it could only select and dial numbers — not surf the Net. … Internally, the project was known as P2 [the current iPhone], short for Purple 2 (the abandoned iPod phone was called Purple 1)

The P1 iPhone Project

This iPhone project was apparently called P1. There is ample evidence for the P1 in the patent libraries and an examination of the inventors show that Steve Jobs was intimately involved in the project — he was lead inventor on most of the patents (not the usual way at Apple). The use of the standard iPod interface and the quality of the diagrams suggest that the plans for the P1 were quite advanced and tally with Wired’s suggestion that P1 prototypes were tested at Apple. It is interesting that a project that Jobs was so involved in never saw the light of day, whereas the P2 project (the patents of which don’t list Jobs as an inventor). Could Steve Jobs be mellowing in his middle age; allowing a competing project to become a product while his project died seems to be very un-Steve… (maybe we’ll see a new Steve Project at Macworld!)

Three of the P1 Patents

ID: 20070152979
Inventors: Jobs; Steven P.; Forstall; Scott; Christie; Greg; Ording; Bas; Chaudhri; Imran; Lemay; Stephen O.; Van Os; Marcel; Anzures; Freddy Allen
Filed: July 24, 2006

ID: 20070155369
Title: Replay Recommendations in a Text Entry Interface
Inventors: Jobs; Steven P.; Forstall; Scott; Christie; Greg; Ording; Bas; Chaudhri; Imran; Lemay; Stephen O.; Van Os; Marcel; Anzures; Freddy Allen
Filed: July 24, 2006

ID: 20070155434
Title: Telephone Interface for a Portable Communication Device
Filed: July 24, 2006
Inventors: Jobs; Steven P.; Forstall; Scott; Christie; Greg; Ording; Bas; Chaudhri; Imran; Lemay; Stephen O.; Van Os; Marcel; Anzures; Freddy Allen; Matos; Mike;

The first patent application 20070152979 is for “Text Entry Interface for a Portable Communication Device”. This is important because a phone the size of an iPod Nano is not going to be able to incorporate a touchscreen or sophisticated input device in the immediate future- So it’s back to the future with a scrollwheel. How do you dial a number or send a text with a scrollwheel I hear you ask– the answer is: with some difficulty! Steve reckons using visual feedback on the screen you can use the scroll wheel to dial numbers. Further, text input will be aided by sophisticated predictive text.

The second patent application 20070155369 with Steve as first inventor is the enigmatically named ‘Replay Recommendations in a Text Entry Interface‘. Now, this patent makes you wonder how Steve can make so much sense in an Apple keynote but make so little sense in a patent abstract. It basically addresses a number of ways a user could enter SMSes into a iPod iPhone.

The third patent concerns using the iPod like a rotary dial telephone– “A method of using a portable communications device includes displaying a first image of a rotary dial in a display of the portable communications device in response to a first contact by a user with a click wheel. The first image of the rotary dial includes a plurality of icons arranged proximate to a periphery of the rotary dial. The plurality of icons include numbers.”