The iPod-Based Interface That Lost Out To iOS For The iPhone

[Megalith]

Here’s an interesting look at what iOS could have been. Some people at Apple were so enamored with the iPod dial functionality that they virtualized it.

Instead of the modern touch-driven interface we now call iOS, it featured an operating system dubbed “Acorn OS” (this was an internal code name, and it unclear if it would have kept that name if it had been released), which is derived from the acorn shown on boot. It presents an on-screen click wheel, which took up the bottom portion of the screen, and on the other half of the screen, a UI identical to the one found on the beloved iPod, with options such as “Dial”, “SMS”, “Music”, “Contacts” and “Recents”, however lacking a browser option. The interface is interacted with in the same way an iPod would be operated.

 

[Leafsolardaddy]

That is interesting, I'd be curious to know if consumers would have flocked to this like they did for the final product.

 

[Nolan7689]

A virtual pad though indicates a touchscreen. So at which point....what is the point of it?

 

[Zarathustra[H]]

lol. That' just goes to show how blind organizations can be to reality.

IMHO, I thought the iPods were nifty little devices in their day. Not revolutionary as mr. Jobs would have us believe, after all there were plenty of mobile mp3 players at the time, but they were a nice stylish facelift for the mp3 player.

The click-wheel thing was one of two things I absolutely hated about them though, and why I didn't get one until close to the end of iPod days, and then, only to leave one in the center console of my car when I had a iPod compatible head unit.

The other - of course - was the whole syncing database based function. I hated that. It would have been so easy for it to just be a mass storage device I could manage in the file system, I could drag and drop my files onto, and it would the see them and play them.

I don't understand why everything these days has to sync, create databases and manage everything. Its so annoying. Simple folder structures in the file system are so much better.

First, iTunes, then iPhoto, etc. etc. Then our phones started doing it, and now Windows 10 is doing it to with their photo app too. I absolutely hate it. I just want to organize my pictures and my music into folders and click on the files I want to see/play. None of this database shit.

 

[XenIneX]

That is interesting, I'd be curious to know if consumers would have flocked to this like they did for the final product.

Well... no. That's why it never saw the light of day.

A virtual pad though indicates a touchscreen. So at which point....what is the point of it?

It was an R&D prototype. Grab an off-the-shelf touchscreen, and get a code-monkey to throw together a quick-n-dirty click-wheel simulation so they can get to work on a prototype UI. The end result would have literally been "an iPod that you can make calls on," but at that early stage, there was no actual hardware.

lol. That' just goes to show how blind organizations can be to reality.

IMHO, I thought the iPods were nifty little devices in their day. Not revolutionary as mr. Jobs would have us believe, after all there were plenty of mobile mp3 players at the time, but they were a nice stylish facelift for the mp3 player.

The click-wheel thing was one of two things I absolutely hated about them though, and why I didn't get one until close to the end of iPod days, and then, only to leave one in the center console of my car when I had a iPod compatible head unit.

The other - of course - was the whole syncing database based function. I hated that. It would have been so easy for it to just be a mass storage device I could manage in the file system, I could drag and drop my files onto, and it would the see them and play them.

I don't understand why everything these days has to sync, create databases and manage everything. Its so annoying. Simple folder structures in the file system are so much better.

First, iTunes, then iPhoto, etc. etc. Then our phones started doing it, and now Windows 10 is doing it to with their photo app too. I absolutely hate it. I just want to organize my pictures and my music into folders and click on the files I want to see/play. None of this database shit.

You clearly forget how dog-slow portable storage was at the time. It's not an issue now, when phones are capable of sequential reads in the hundreds of megabytes per second, but indexing files used to take ages. A first-gen iPod would probably have taken ten minutes or more to index a full drive.

That's no excuse for iTunes being terrible now, of course, but prior to the iPhone? It was a net benefit.

 

[sir-gold]

lol. That' just goes to show how blind organizations can be to reality.

IMHO, I thought the iPods were nifty little devices in their day. Not revolutionary as mr. Jobs would have us believe, after all there were plenty of mobile mp3 players at the time, but they were a nice stylish facelift for the mp3 player.

The click-wheel thing was one of two things I absolutely hated about them though, and why I didn't get one until close to the end of iPod days, and then, only to leave one in the center console of my car when I had a iPod compatible head unit.

The other - of course - was the whole syncing database based function. I hated that. It would have been so easy for it to just be a mass storage device I could manage in the file system, I could drag and drop my files onto, and it would the see them and play them.

I don't understand why everything these days has to sync, create databases and manage everything. Its so annoying. Simple folder structures in the file system are so much better.

First, iTunes, then iPhoto, etc. etc. Then our phones started doing it, and now Windows 10 is doing it to with their photo app too. I absolutely hate it. I just want to organize my pictures and my music into folders and click on the files I want to see/play. None of this database shit.

The click-wheel was still an upgrade over the solid-state touch-donut that the 3rd gen (original series) IPod had. At least the click-wheel had line-by-line tactile feedback, this thing had to feedback at all, and it was too easy to go past the thing you were aiming for.