Wall Street Journal backs up "iPhone nano" rumor

Maybe it's a camera. The iCamera!!
I can see it now!!

The announcement of an iPhone prototype with a physical keyboard seems to give credence to this rumor.
Smaller retina display to match the resolution on the 3GS, physical keyboard for texting, 3GS spec hardware... and bam, suddenly you have a phone that could be cheap enough to be free with contract or $100-200 without.

And suddenly the idea doesn't seem nearly as ridiculous.

Obviously it wouldn't be called the iPhone nano. It would be called the iPhone Air maybe ;)

It will be called the IPhone Nano. Apple is gonna take the iPod Nano, add cellular capabilities and a front facing camera to it, then package it with a watch strap and cheap BT headset. Maybe they'll add the recently unveiled air/non-touching gestures to it, which will allow you to write in the air with your finger to input text. Scifi technology is coming to the real world. The future is here folks.

I think it's the stupidest idea in the world. I really hope there's no weight to it. The current iPhone is the perfect size. I don't think I've ever-ever-ever thought, "wow this thing is way too big and too heavy".. (insert blue joke here such as 'although my wife has').

But seriously, it makes no sense to me. Lower cost? Is that keeping people from buying iPhones? Go in Walmart and you see people shopping in pajamas and talking on their iPhones. Many apps barely fit on the current screen. The on screen keyboard on this iPhone already takes up most of the screen. So apps would have to be something totally new and not retro-fitted iPhone apps.

"edge-to-edge screen" for me means the same screen size as the current iPhone, just with no space on the top and bottom where the home button and speaker & front camera are now. Meaning it would be shorter, but the same width. (With speaker on the top and home button moved somewhere like on the sides.)

Which then means it would be about 1/3 smaller, which fits the article.

Sounds pretty awesome.

And then iPod nano-touch comes out with the same changes in the fall.

"Half-size" when referring to a three-dimensional object usually refers to total volume, not length or surface area. For example, a 21% reduction each in thickness, length and width would result in a 50% reduction in volume (0.79 ^3 = 0.50). There is about 0.75 inches of phone above and below the display area on my iPhone 4. The display takes up about 60% of the surface area, and is much shorter than the phone. I'll bet the engineers at Apple can figure out how to reduce volume by 50% while maintaining the same screen size. Or if not the same screen size, the same pixel count with slightly smaller pixel size. Personally, I would LOVE to have an iPhone that would slip easily into the watch pocket of a pair of Levis 501s, and not stick out over an inch.

Apple WILL NOT MAKE A NANO iPhone! Period!

The current iPhone is cheap enough! No one wants to listen to their music over the cloud. And can you imagine what a pain in the ass it would be to text on an iPhone nano? Seriously. It might be something dumb enough fir Nokia to make such a small unfunctional device, but not Apple.

I would bet a million dollars on it. Apple will NOT make an iPhone nano! It wouldn't be very functional and I'm sure Jobs said hell no to the idea less than sixty seconds after the thought entered his head. The current iPhone is small enough!

It's not tasteful. It's not functional. And the device would suck which would lower people's opinion of apple, something Job's would NEVER allow. I can't believe people are actually falling for this stupidity.

I'm sorry, but does the idea of a half sized iPhone not strike anyone else as *bloody stupid*? The display would be far too small to run existing iPhone apps on, so it would either launch with a tiny number of apps, or not be able to run apps at all.

Honestly, has anyone actually thought about that? An iPhone without apps is such a preposterous concept that I'm struggling to find the words to argue my point! Sure, the iPhone is an excellent iPod, and a pretty decent phone, but to take the apps out would leave what? A dumbphone, that's what. So let's take that idea outside and shoot it.

So, a half sized iPhone with apps. Great. But what about the form factor. The recently announced HP (Palm) Veer is apparently about the size of a credit card. Well, I've put my card on top of my iPhone and a half sized iPhone would have to be even smaller than that. I struggle to see, even with a non 2:3 aspect ratio display, how that could work, especially without a hardware keyboard. You'd get a very short iPhone with a keyboard that, when up, covers the vast majority of the display.

Put in a sliding hardware keyboard and a squarish display, though, and I can see it working quite well. There's enough space above and below the display to actually make the display a fair bit taller than square while retaining most of the width, so apps could probably be redesigned reasonably quickly. The status bar goes double height when on a call, and many apps adjust properly to the slight reduction in height, so assuming that the current API allows for a more dramatic reduction, thousands of apps would only need to be *tested* for the new height, and that could be done in the simulator.

Hmm. I seem to have convinced myself that a half sized iPhone isn't such a stupid idea after all! I'm standing by my opinion that it would be a bit silly not to have a sliding keyboard, though. I think it would make for a merely satisfactory user experience, and that's not what we expect from Apple.

Sam

I will assuredly buy it if it is simpler and lighter than the iPhone: a phone is a phone is a phone and my iPhone does too many things, it confuses me.