John Markoff in the NYT:

Apple’s multitouch technology began life not as a cellphone, but as a notepad-sized skunkworks project internally dubbed Safari Pad, run by Tim Bucher, then Apple’s head of Macintosh hardware. To his credit, Mr. Jobs seized on the technology and morphed it into the iPhone.

I suspected something like this for awhile. At first, they touted the iPhone’s singular focus on making phone calls really, really well, sort of like the iPod does music really, really well. And then talked up the other features almost as an afterthought. And while it’s true that making calls on the iPhone is far better than on any other device, there clear evidence that the iPhone was meant to be a mobile WiFi platform since the beginning. If all the rumors and speculation about the Apple pad/tablet were just R&D that went into what eventually became the iPhone, that’s enough for me. I know exactly one person who has ever been interested in owning a tablet PC, and one other person who has one, and despises it. Not to say that Apple couldn’t do it, and do it much better, but perhaps they already have.