New rumor is three new iPhones
By Gareth Powell
Three new iPhones will appear in 2009, according to an analyst, not a profession one would wish in the family. This possibility has been mentioned before but not through an analyst. Our sources are the manufacturers in China. Canadian research firm Canaccord Adams possibly does it another way.
Analyst Peter Misek of that company says the most lavish of the three will be a 32GB iPhone 3G available in multiple colors — blinging the iPhone into a Nano mode. This sounds possible. There are people who will pimp their 3G with zebra stripes, so anything is possible. The original picture — merely a suggestion — is shrunk to fit the standard picture, so we repeat it below once again for your perving pleasure.
Look below on its like with awe for it will never happen.
The remaining two will be a rebirth of the original iPhone ‘targeted for China and India.’ The original iPhone, as you’ll remember, had no GPS circuitry — a limitation that some observers believe would be required by the security-conscious Chinese government.
The third and final new iPhone would be a low-cost device ‘about one-third the size of the 3G iPhone,’ according to Seeking Alpha. Which is much smaller than the much-rumored iPhone Nano, for which case maker XSKN of Shenzhen, China, is already selling cases on its website.
Call me daft, if you will, but there is no manufacturer in Shenzhen who who will make a case for a machine that will not exist. This is guesswork compounded by a balls-up.
Yes, it is a fair bet there will be a smaller iPhone. Samples have been made. Markets like China and India are naturals.
One snag. It means they can never be used as reading devices for anything longer than an SMS message and perhaps not even then. Chinese is bad enough on a standard iPhone or iPod Touch without making it smaller. At a guess it will be intended for sound only. Many Chinese prefer to listen to books rather than read them. Odd but true. (Not dramatizations. Just one person reading the whole book albeit in an animated style.)
Misek believes that any low-cost iPhone, such as the one he predicts, would not be a voice-only device. In that we can have some agreement. The iPhone is a platform, not a mere phone-call machine, and as such it’s a gateway into the continuing revenue stream that’s the iTunes App Store. BUT, it cannot be used to read Chinese with any facility.
The answer as to what the final machine will look like is no one knows. Any serious China watcher is able to tell you where they will be made and probably when we will see them — June is a good date. And there is also a security problem in China which can be solved.
Three news models? Could be.
Two for certain, sure.
The rest comes for an analyst. As a group they are not in great favor at the moment.
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February 8th, 2009
I can’t imagine any success with a non-SMS iPhone, but making the handset smaller would result in an almost unusable keyboard. Look forward to see how they get around that, maybe voice recognition?
February 15th, 2009
I am very suss of voice recognition which I have used on and off for years. It simply does not work when you want it to. I think the iPhone onscreen keyboard is the best ever made but I really want a proper keyboard that plugs in. It can be done but it detracts from the idea of a small iPhone. It is a puzzlement.