CALIFORNIA,US:Addressing a technology conference outside Los Angeles on Tuesday, Apple Inc. CEO Steve Jobs shared a secret with his audience: The idea for the iPad came before the iPhone.

According to an AP report, the idea to ditch the keyboard for what Jobs calls a multi-touch display came about in the early 2000s, although the company was working on a telephone at the time, he said. That's when a prototype was brought to him that used the device's now-famous scrolling mechanism.

"I thought, 'My God we can build a phone out of this,'" Jobs said at The Wall Street Journal's "D: All Things Digital" conference in Rancho Palos Verdes.

But the tablet product was put on the shelf, the iPhone went into development for several years before making its debut in 2007 and Apple only started selling the iPad tablet computer in April.

Both products have taken on more of the personal computing tasks once handled by computers running Microsoft Corp.'s Windows operating system and other programs.