Stop us if you’ve heard this one before: The iPhone will get a nano-sized little brother (or sister), and one of these days, MobileMe will be free to everyone. The difference is, now this information is coming a reliable source not usually known for tossing out wild rumors and speculation.
The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Apple is hard at work on something code-named “N97” -- essentially a smaller, cheaper iPhone that will be “about half the price of the main iPhones,” allowing carriers to subsidize “most or all of the retail price.” The theory goes, if you could get a free “iPhone nano,” would you even bother with Android?
Of course, this isn’t the first time we’ve heard such rumors, but coming from the WSJ, folks are paying closer attention. Apparently, at least one person talking to the newspaper has actually seen this purported “iPhone nano” in action.
“The person who saw the prototype of the new iPhone said the device was significantly lighter than the iPhone 4 and had an edge-to-edge screen that could be manipulated by touch, as well as a virtual keyboard and voice-based navigation,” the report reveals. The same source also told the paper that the company is working hard to update the iPhone 4 for this year, but that’s something most everyone already knows.
The same source of information also claims that Apple will drop their $99 annual fee for the MobileMe service, which would then “serve as a ‘locker’ for personal memorabilia such as photos, music and videos, eliminating the need for devices to carry a lot of memory,” the source revealed.
“The new MobileMe file-storage and music service could be available as early as June, depending on the progress of licensing talks that are in their preliminary stages,” the report continues. “Apple had planned for the service to roll out a year earlier.
“The new service would give users access to their iTunes libraries from, say, an iPhone or iPad, instead of requiring that the devices be synced by cable with a computer and use space to store the actual files,” the report concludes. Needless to say, backward compatibility with at least the iPhone 4 is also on the table.
It’s a given that a new iPhone will land around June of this year, but since it may just be a minor refresh of the existing iPhone 4, the big news this year may be the introduction of a smaller model -- and free MobileMe, which would make current paying members perhaps the most expensive beta testers in software history.
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(Image courtesy of 9to5Mac)
TheBreen
February 14, 2011 at 10:24am
It's very unlikely that Apple would simply drop the annual $99 subscription fee for MobileMe. Among other reasons, it would make for very messy accounting for the existing subscribers.
It's also unlikely that iTunes music "streaming from the cloud" would replace or make up for reduced storage on iPhones, given the high costs and bandwidth caps imposed by the mobile networks.
That said, some kind of additional service, tied to MobileMe but available for free to purchasers of the latest version of the iPhone—exactly how 'Find my iPhone' works now—would be perfectly reasonable. Wireless synchronization to iTunes is certainly feasible too. But "N97," which fits the type of engineering names given to pre-release Apple products, could just as easily be the iPhone 5 as an additional model of iPhone.
While I don't see anything in Apple's past behavior that would preclude an additional model of iPhone, the strategy of this year's phone at $199 or last year's phone at $99 has worked pretty well for them. I'm not sure how "this year's mini-phone for free" would affect that model.
