Early iPhone prototype featured a huge 5x7-inch screen, several ports: Report

Ever imagined what the iPhone looked like when it was still in its nascent stages? Folks over at Ars Technica have got their hands on certain images revealing a very early iPhone prototype, two years before the first Apple smartphone made its debut in 2007.

The 2005 prototype images, courtesy a former unknown Apple employee, shows the iPhone measuring five inches wide and seven inches tall. This clearly is contradictory to Apple's 'less is more' policy that we relate to now. The blog mentions that the employee had the opportunity to work on several hardware projects for Apple in the early 2000s and was thus able to check out the early iPhone versions.

The prototype was around two inches thick compared with the mini at just over a quarter of an inch. It also had quite a few ports including an Ethernet port, a serial port, and several USB ports. However, according to the blog's source, the device was meant to be a development prototype and these ports were not intended to feature on the end product.

Considering the device was still in its conceptual stages, "at that early date no one knew what [the final device] would be," the source said.

That said, the processor isn't that much different than the one used in the 2007 debut version of the phone. According to Ars writer Andrew Cunningham, the ARM chip in the prototype looks like a variant of Samsung's S3C2410 and he called it "a distant relative of the chip the first iPhone ended up using, just older and slower."

The blog also highlights that the S3C2410 is an ARM9 chip clocking in at 200-233MHz, while the 2007 iPhone used an ARM11-based 620MHz chip under-clocked to 412Mhz. But the prototype shows that Apple tapped into Samsung for the phone's ARM chip right from the beginning.

Image Courtesy: Ars Technica