The iPhone may be one of the thinnest and sleekest phones out now, but it started out as a bit of a heifer. A former Apple employee sent these images to Arstechnica. This early iPhone prototype from 2005 was nearly 2 inches thick, and had an iPad Mini like screen dimension of 5 inches by 7 inches. Because it was a prototype that had to be connected to other devices, every port imaginable was added in order for developors to work on the device, which is the reason for the 2-inch thickness. The unnamed source reported that at that early date, no one knew what the final product would look like, due to the flexible nature of Apple’s development process.
The prototype features a Samsung ARM9 chip, which was a slower version of ARM11 used in the first iPhone, indicating that Apple stuck with a Samsung processor from its early prototypes through the launch.
Sadly, at the rate phones are growing these days, you may be holding a phone this size up to your head in a few years.
(images via Arstechnica)
