iPhone to get a “mini-me”?
Rumors are flying about the possibility of an “iPhone Nano†being introduced soon. iDealsChina broke the story and has pictures of an iPhone Nano case in production by XSKN for the new device.From the pictures, the form factor is somewhat smaller than the iPhone, and the screen appears to be about 4/5 as big. Ars Technica is skeptical about the idea of a new, even smaller iPhone:
Frankly, it’s hard to imagine how such a device would be very practical. Having a higher-resolution screen would make icons and buttons even smaller, which, in turn, would make pointing with a finger difficult. Having a screen with something other than 480×320 pixel size would make a lot of current software incompatible, or at least look like a mess. A smaller phone also means a smaller battery, and some folks already complain about the iPhone’s battery life as it is.
Still, a premature case leak is what gave away the form factor of the new iPod Nano and iPhone 3G earlier this year (though as Ars points out, it was already known that such a thing was coming).
If the price is cheap enough, and existing apps work properly on it, the Nano might serve to get some new people interested in e-book reading. (Even if many people claim to dislike reading from a regular iPhone-sized screen, there will still be some who enjoy it even from a Nano-sized one.) Still, it would be nice if Apple would listen to people who have been asking for them to go in the opposite direction and make a larger iPod Touch-like device for e-book reading.
UPDATE: MacRumors.com has an iPhone Nano “concept photo†which shows an iPhone with three rows of four icons (above the row of four in the bottom bar) instead of four.
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