Apple Engineer Reveals the Secret History of the iPhone

Apple senior engineer Greg Christie was part of the team that conjured up the iPhone back in 2005. Now, in an interview with The Wall Street Journal — preceding the next chapter in the legal battle between Apple and Samsung — he reveals some of the fascinating details about the device's early history

Christie, who is credited with a patent for iPhone's "slide to unlock" feature, describes the original team behind the iPhone as "shockingly small."

As Christie and the rest of the team were mulling over several ideas and concepts about how the device — then dubbed "project Purple" — would look and feel, an impatient Steve Jobs gave them two weeks to figure it out, or else he would assign the project to another team. This lead to the earliest concept for the iPhone, which was envisioned as a mix between a touchscreen phone and an iPod, without a physical keyboard Read more...