For several years now, an elite squad of engineers at Apple Computer have been working diligently
to perfect an intuitive smart phone concept that would both conform to the company’s integrated model and oblige chief executive Steve Jobs.
As AppleInsider has been told, it’s the latter of those two feats that has thus far presented the utmost of challenges, largely preserving the project and its many facets behind the fortified walls of the company’s Cupertino, Calif. home base.
It’s believed that the initiative, which is different and slightly more ambitious than the company’s "iPhone" project, truly gained momentum about three years ago alongside the development of Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger. Some of the device’s original features, such as Bluetooth remote control of certain Mac OS X functions, were meant to coincide with those that would have subsequently appeared in the final version of the Tiger operating system.
But as the story goes, Apple took the latest iteration of its proprietary smart phone hardware and software in the early summer of 2005, slapped it together inside an enclosure reminiscent of a fourth-gen iPod, and hit the road. AppleInsider | Apple smart phone project rests on Mac OS X tie-ins