MacRumors.com

The New York Times' John Markoff reveals that the iPhone began life as a "Safari Pad":

AppleÂ’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 AppleÂ’s head of Macintosh hardware. To his credit, Mr. Jobs seized on the technology and morphed it into the iPhone.

This adds a bit of information to a revealing Wired article which reported that Apple engineers had spent about a year working on a Tablet PC before being redirected to the iPhone project.

When Markoff asked Jobs directly about the possibility of a larger iPod Touch tablet, he said "I can't talk about unannounced products."

Recent rumors have suggested that Apple may be reviving a mini-tablet project with a device 1.5 times the size of the current iPhone/Touch. The rumored Apple device is expected to also incorporate Apple's touch OS X that currently powers the iPhone. Adding to our expectations, Apple executives have described their mobile devices as the first "mainstream Wi-Fi mobile platform" with a belief that the new Software Development Kit (SDK) will broaden this platform even more.