Apple this year will be celebrating their 'tenth' year anniversary of launching their iPhones to the consumer markets. Consumers this year must surely be expecting something genuinely innovative from the Cupertino firm. Meanwhile, Tony Fadell, the main lead of their hardware team, for the iPods at the time when he was working with Apple, later to shift his focus on iPhones spoke in detail about how the initial concepts of the Apple iPhones were like.

Initially when asked whether the iPhone was just an iPod converted into a phone with an inclusion of an Apple developed operating system to make it work like a smartphone, he believed it wasn't so. He gave a detailed interview to The Verge where he spoke on a lot of things about his days with Apple.

The news was also visible on Yahoo tech where the initial speculations about the possibilities of an iPod with a virtual click wheel gathered a lot of press, was the inception of the discussions that he was involved in.  He said 'it was a competing set of ideas, not teams' and also stressed that all of them were working on the same project at some point of time.

He added on explaining about the methodology at Apple involving two specific paths mainly consisting of the hardware side and the software usability being the other. The original report, available here on The Verge goes in-depth about the whole interview bringing out a lot of previously unavailable discussions involving Apple iPhones.

Apparently, the virtual click wheel discussion was also one of the possibilities for the iPod at one point of time, that were being considered by the Cupertino firm. The video that hinted about the possibility was reportedly the process that the Software/UI team were trying out but in reality an actual working prototype was never achieved.

He also later added that at one point of time, they tried everything possible they could, with even lesser buttons that were accessible than the existing iPods etc.