Apple's Jobs says iPad idea came before iPhone

> Apple Inc. CEO Steve Jobs shared a secret with his audience at a technology conference outside Los Angeles Tuesday: The idea for the iPad came before the iPhone. Those of us who follow Apple as closely as I do wouldn’t consider this a secret. It’s fairly obvious, once you start using the iPad, that much of the iPhone OS was designed with the bigger form factor of the iPad in mind. Or, at the very least, most of the essential components of the user experience are not tied to a specific form factor. That’s what makes the iPhone OS so malleable.

Before I had ever used an iPad, I wouldn’t have guessed just how right for a tablet the iPhone OS is. But now that I’ve seen it in action, I think with a few refinements it will become far more powerful and game-changing than we even now realize.

I haven’t used Android enough to make a value judgement on this, but I suspect that since Android was originally conceived as a Windows Mobile OS killer and not a foundation for a whole new paradigm in portable computing, Google is going to have a rougher time making that transition from phone to tablet. They are just now adding true multi-touch input capabilities, years after the initial release. Which means multi-touch will always be an add-on for Android, whereas it’s the foundation of iPhone OS.

Clearly, Microsoft’s notion that you can slap Windows on a tablet, give users a pen, and change the world was a complete failure. Scaling down a giant beast proved to be unwise. I’m not so sure scaling UP Android will necessarily work better. But I think there’s at least a better chance of that working in the long term.