Back in 2007, Apple Steve Job Co-Founder triggered a revolution in the mobile computer industry when it announced a device that would combine iPods with touch control, cellphones, and internet communication. However, almost a decade before the work took the world with his “Three Things” Persuasive speech, a company called Infogear gave birth to radical telephone ideas – also called an iPhone – which can help users browse emails and are connected to users of the Internet primitive version.
IPhone Forsaken Infogear was born in the national semiconductor lab as a skunkworks project, Brian McCullough wrote on internet history podcasts. The company has provided funds to Chaim Bendelac engineers, Reuven Marko, and Yuval Shahar to work on product prototypes that can function as a telephone and internet browsing device. The first not perfect prototype uses an 8-bit processor similar to that is found in a fax machine and combines it with a screen to offer a basic web search experience.
‘Project Mercury’ as the future of communication
The project – called the Project Mercury – thrown into the venture capitalist, Robert Ackerman, who later explained that it did not need a long time to realize that he was looking at a future device. When Ackerman tells in the interview of the Internet Podcast History, the circuit that is difficult to arrange makes it imagine “exactly the type of post-PC web-based computer thought by Silicon Valley’s Mights began to predict.”
Chuffed with this project, Ackerman then had to convince Gilbert Amelio, the President at the National Semiconductor at the time, to alleviate the three engineers and sell mercury projects. The project group later became an independent company Infogear Technology Corporation.
By chance, Amelio is also a member of the Apple board at the time and he then continued to become Apple CEO, where he bought the next Steve Jobs and brought the job back to Apple as a consultant (via Wikipedia). The convincing work of the council to Oant Amelio as soon as it was and became his own CEO.
iPhone as a “telephone information”
The mercury project mainly acquires the name of the iPhone in the early days of development; It is based on naming Techno Fad from the initial dot-com era and used to define the phone “on steroids.” Ackerman noted during the interview that “iPhone” was based on the idea of ”Internet Phone” or “Information Phone”.
Ackerman wants the iPhone Infogear to be easy to use as an ATM, even for seniors. The focus on a simple and intuitive design causes the recruitment of frog design, a industrial design company that previously designed several Mac computers. The original iPhone model is equipped with a 7-inch black-and-white LCD touch screen and a full slide-out keyboard. Because the LCD screen only costs $ 80, the first infogear product was launched at a price of $ 499 at an additional $ 20 for internet use.
A number of features made the iPhone infogear an ancestor of spiritual to modern smartphones. This model has capacitive touch control to facilitate early adopters. For example, the iPhone automatically highlighted the telephone number on a web page, allowing users to call it just by pressing it. In addition, while Infogear Gizmo is too early to offer video calls or messages, automatically transrotce Voicemail with capacitive buttons on the screen to rotate the caller.