Apple iPhone Could Have Had A Physical Keyboard - Solar Panels News

Apple iPhone 4S 16GB - AT&T - Black on Amazon

According to some new information, Apple almost went with a keyboard toting iPhone before the scrapping the idea entirely. So there were chances of the iPhone looking like the original Motorola Droid and a multitude of other phones in the market right now. Apple finally decided to go with only one physical button and best in class touchscreen and the rest, as they say, is history.

Tony Fadell, an ex senior vice president of the iPod division within Apple, revealed this information during an interview session at <em>The Verge</em>. Fadell was an important figured through an astounding 18 generations of the iPod and the first three generations of the iPhone. Now he is working on his own company called Nest, which makes smart thermostats.

According to Fadell, there were not two but three separate working versions of the device before they decided to go with the touchscreen only version. He said that he had always been in favor of the touchscreen version. And now the devices has reached an iconic status and has inspired the whole industry to rethink mobile technology and play catch up for over 4 years.

Apple is no longer the only company offering a fully touchscreen based mobile device. There’s now multiple other companies offering the same hardware features (almost) and running on either Android or Windows Phone for the most part. It is now a completely standard design. So much so that all smartphones have started looking more or less similar and basically all of them owe their existence at this point to the initial iPhone.

Interestingly, the first iPhone had actually drawn negative remarks for not including a keypad. This sparked a range of third party accessories that added a physical keyboard to the device. However, these soon faded from the market and only a few remain now. The iPhone is now in wide spread usage that spans the whole world and it is one of the biggest businesses that Apple has. The fact that the company could be in a dominant position making what is essentially one phone model and updating once a year â€" says a lot about how successful the product was and still is.

Going beyond what Fadell said, Steve Jobs has been known to drop ideas and then pick them up again. He had once dismissed the idea of a phone that has everything, including the iPod. He said such a convergence would never work. Fast forward a few years â€" we have the first iPhone. So either he was sending out wrong signals to competitors or he really did change his mind. Whatever it was, the iPhone changed the face of mobile phone as we know it and to think it almost sacrificed its sleek form factor to include a keypad. In fact, not conforming to existing expectations of a smartphone is what helped the iPhone innovate. And that is what really set it apart.