iPhone nano: A rumor before its time

An Iphone Nano would be nice, it would become the latest fashion statement at school when all the high schoolers can finally afford to own one.

http://www.tranharry.com

Joy of Tech did a brilliant comic about this yesterday:

Tom Joad iPhone nano

wow…i think making it a bit smaller and thinner is a fantastic idea, as long as it dosen,t take away from the functionality. i hope people don’t look at that pic of the iphone shuffle and think cool.

The only way a shuffle iPhone makes any sense is if it:

a) Synchronizes only names and phone numbers from an external source (Outlook or a custom-built app like the Palm desktop)
b) Recognizes voice commands (like LG’s ‘Call Someone’ or ‘Digit Dial’ spoken commands)
c) Is a phone roughly the size and form factor of a Bluetooth headset.

That way, you don’t need to have an interface for dialing and, since phone number and user data is very tiny, it wouldn’t require much memory to store thousands of phone numbers.

I think all of the manufacturers are missing out on this area. I don’t want my phone to be a camera, MP3 player, web browser, book reader, etc. I just want it to be a phone!

First manufacturer to do this wins my support!

That’s what I want, a phone that dials numbers randomly, brilliant!

Hello? Who is this? You called me. I know, but I have the phone set on random, so I don’t know who I’m calling.

Hey,

I for one, wouldn’t mind a nanoPhone that perfectly syncs my Address Book, Calendar, iPhotos and iTunes.

I could care less about the wifi, GPS and Safari and the dopey camera.

Just add a phone to the iPod nano and I’ll be happy. (Oh yea,sell it to Verizon too!

Asher’s “bunny” story was a superb analogy of the cell market.

There’s a python in the room but the bunnies keep munching their lettuce. The biggest and the fattest bunny says “I produce so many different products, the python will not eat me”. The Korean bunnies are oblivious because they think that they have lower costs and some other bunnies bury their head in the grass by saying that the python is good because it increases the “market”!

Already one of the oldest bunnies is sick, mumbling incessantly “Hello Moto”, sickness attributed to competition with other bunnies, but no bunny admits that it is the fear of the python that strangles the MotoBunny even before the python has coiled its rings around him.

But the python is dressed in a hide of a cool underdog, has religious-zeal support from “free-mason” style collaborators, excellent products with design that even the richest bunnies can’t seem to be able to imitate and can’t even seem to understand. Many employees of the “bunnies” are secret admirers of the python. Most of the consumers are willing to pay more for the python’s products and with the prices of hardware constantly falling, the old-school bunnies’ wishful-thinking advantage is slimmer that a leaf of their lettuce.

The bunnies think that the python will be kind and play by the rules of the market, but the python is predatory and loves to go for the throat, of even the biggest foes (a good example, the throat of a lazy fat old dragon called MS – in the classic “I’m a Mac/I’m a PC”).

The only bunny that does something, or at least seems to have its eyes and mind open is a business oriented, berry-munching bunny, this bunny understands what is going on, and even tries to emulate the python’s products.

Bottom (and depressing) line. Given the situation in the market of mobile phones, Apple has a good chance to come close to what it did in the MP3 players market. Of course, 60-70% market-share is on the long-end of the probability distribution (even if not impossible, given the docile competitor-bunnies), but 20% is a possibility in my opinion and 20% of the market is 100m mobile devices and countless revenue sharing deals and promotion of other Apple products, bringing Steven Jobs’ to world domination with market-cap surpassing that of Microsoft in 2009 to the delight of the new faithful (the old faithful would shudder at the thought that Apple is not an underdog). And I am what you fanboys (erroneously) would call “Apple hater”…

My 20 yr old son went out and bought the iphone a few weeks back, he was so amazed by it hes now gone out and bought a macbook. Halo effect.

Right now it seems impossible to get a 32GB iPOD Touch (not PHONE) here in Switzerland. Can this be an alert for a new iPod touch ? Or simply is this country too small ?

Might need really thin fingers!

Unlikely

If there is a new Itouch will it cost less than the current one. I noticed that Target gave you a $25 gift card if you bought a Itouch. I figured that this indicated that Apple was attempting to reduce Itouch inventory for a new one to be introduced

Who knows? Could be a play to double market share and ship another 10M nanos (cannibalizing 3M 3Gs?) this Xmas.

If not, what’s the next big play? New notebooks, mini, and AppleTV?

I think the more likely announcement for Q4 is an iPod Touch Nano.

A nice roundup of the speculation, but there’s a problem with all of it. Apple doesn’t drop their distinctive features in the newer smaller products, they drop the elements of generic products that people can live without: CD in MacBook Air, or provide he same experience with less capacity in a smaller package: iPod nano. An iPhone nano couldn’t be just smaller, they’d have to lose the screen which provides the Apple identity: real web view and the touch interface. The only way to make an iPhone nano both distinctive and usable would be to make one totally hands free that only does one thing well: make and receive calls and possibly messages. THis would require a huge breakthrough in voice recognition. Maybe they can do this but with driving laws requiring hands free this feature would need to be a software upgrade for all current iPhones as well. I’ll be happy if they do such a thing.

is it April First today?

Good! Rumors of new AAPL products just show how much interest people have in this wildly innovative company. Is it possible AAPL will sell 5 million iPhones this quarter? Man, that seems like a lot of product. Can only imagine how many computers go out the door with all those phones. I never really saw that many of the original iPhones out in the wild…but I see the new phone everywhere I go. It’s rather startling actually. On the plane the other day…and everyone in my row had an iPhone! Maybe not the dramatic, but i was flying Southwest, the discount carrier! Anyone that thinks the economy is so bad people aren’t buying new gadgets needs to get out more. These aren’t really luxury items, or even discretionary items…people are naturally moving to the next level of connectivity.