Offering a rare interview in the run-up to another legal
fray between Samsung and Apple, the senior engineer behind the iPhone
has explained where it all started, part of Apple's plan to communicate
how groundbreaking the original iPhone was. Talking to the WSJ,
Greg Christie explained how the secret project, Purple, brought the
iPhone to life. At some point, the former Apple boss told him straight:
the team had two weeks, or he would assign the project elsewhere. "Steve
had pretty much had it... He wanted bigger ideas and bigger concepts."
In the end, the "shockingly small" team had outlined a touchscreen phone
with swipe-to-unlock, no physical keyboard and all the music-playing
features of the company's iPod series. They ran early software tests on a
plastic touchscreen, hooked up to a dated desktop Mac [seen above] --
an effort to emulate a low-powered mobile processor.