Report: Steve Jobs 'worked closely' on new iPhone design

12 hrs.

Rosa Golijan

We've heard that late Apple co-founder?Steve Jobs may have been?working until the day before his death, but now a report tell us just what he was focused on: A new iPhone design.

According to the folks at Bloomberg,?an individual with "knowledge of the plans" Apple has for the iPhone revealed that Jobs "worked closely on the redesigned phone before his death in October."

The same report offers?suggestions that the next generation of Apple's popular smartphone will have a larger screen than prior models.?Reuters has previously made the same claim, specifying that?the new device will "measure four inches from corner to corner," which would "represent a roughly 30 percent increase in viewing area."

As the Verge's Vlad Savov points out, the combination of these reports suggests that "Apple's reconsideration of the iPhone's size wasn't a post-Jobs epiphany and that the company's longtime leader had himself seen the value in enlarging the handset to better compete in an evolving smartphone market."?

This is a bit surprising to those of us who remember how harshly the late Apple co-founder criticized larger smartphones in 2010, when he declared that "no one's going to buy" such devices. Then again, compared to some of the monsters out there now, a 4-inch screen may seem pretty tame.

Want more tech news, silly puns, or amusing links? You'll get plenty of all three if you keep up with Rosa Golijan, the writer of this post, by following her on?Twitter, subscribing to her?Facebook?posts, or circling her?on?Google+.

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