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Apple Plans Cheaper Nano-Based iPhone
bigkahunafish writes "It seems Apple is planning a cheaper version of the iPhone possibly based on the iPod Nano. This phone would be priced below $300 making it more affordable than the $500-600 iPhone. This should bring Apple phone technology into the hands of more users, though this cheaper phone could have more limited functionality. From the article: 'Sales of the [original] iPhone are expected to be limited to a small percentage of the market due to its high price tag, particularly in the United States where 85 percent of consumers tend to spend $100 or less on cell phones. But analysts forecast that a cheaper phone from Apple, which leads the digital music player market, could pose a much bigger threat to long-established phone makers such as Nokia, Motorola Inc, Samsung Electronics Co Ltd and Sony Ericsson, owned by Sony Corp and Ericsson.' I just hope they don't make a phone based on the iPod Shuffle."
... or wait... that's always the dilemma with Apple; they're so tight-lipped you don't know when the latest-and-greatest happens until it's already on shelves. Got burned on my MacBook, so I think I'll be waiting.
@cyg
I expect Apple to fill those holes pretty quickly. But, it's going to take V2 HW to fix some things I'd want like external storage and bigger internal storage.
To Copy from One is Plagiarism; To Copy from Many is Research.
It makes sense for Apple to expand its phone product range, since it is now a phone manufacturer.
What if they succeed and sell tens of millions of units?
Then a computer company would be one of the world's largest phone manufacturers.
That would make the telecommunications industry a lot more interesting. Currently, it is dominated by phone type companies.
Read the article. The features they describe are ones we read about here on slashdot (apple design patents). Ones for rotary gestures and such. This does not mean it's an iphone or a nano. I'll note that if you have watched the multi-touch demos from that guy whose famous for them (what's his name?) and who consults for apple, his MENUs are not bars but sectored circles and you call them up with a spiral gesture. Another apple design patent was for senstitive places around the edge of a screen that are flush with the screen. That is to say physical buttons associated with the edge of a screen.
Those kinds of details could help reduce the screen area needed to support a full-featured phone and perhaps get it dow to a nano-sized thing. Too small to be a real internet broswer device but large enough to pan through a contact list.
anyhow those design patents have been out there for a long time. SO some ones discovering them does not make it news or mean there's a new product.
On the other hand apple needs a response to the two sided phone/music players from samsung. those are ipod-nano killers since even though they are larger than a nano, you could argue that the music player is actually smaller as long as you planned to have a cell phone in your pocket anyhow. A nano sized phone would kill that.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Yes you've nailed it for how it will go for regular consumers.
Keep in mind however that services like www.iresq.com are popping up that WILL replace your iPhone batteries for you. So in the future it may be cheaper to buy a used iPhone and then send it off to get its battery replaced. I also fully expect that a company like NewerTech will at some point offer increased capacity batteries that surpass the performance of the original OEM batteries.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
The rumours for Vodafone seem stronger, especially now that the firmware has been decrypted and shown to contain operator logos for Cingular, AT&T, T-Mobile and Vodafone and no other operators.
If you would perceive it as random, it probably would not be random, since it would have to do a lot of non-random things trying to avoid patterns and repetition. The fact that you think it's not random is almost proof that it pretty much is random :-)