Apple Might Expand Its Smartphone Line
As the Mobile World Congress is underway, many Apple ponders are spreading rumors about Cupertino products that might or might not make in to production. But unlike usual, big news outlets such the WSJ or Bloomberg also jumped in to the foray.
Both reliable sources of industry news concurred that Apple indeed is working on the first of a new line of smaller, less expensive mobile phone and possibly a redesign of its cloud service MobileMe., The move is to accelerate sales of its smartphones amid growing competition.
The smaller iPhone would be half or 3/4 the size of the current iPhone and will be sold at half price to wireless carriers. The current smartphone costs $625 to carriers, who usually subsidy to allow customers to pay only $200 with a two- year contract. A smaller mobile phone makes sense in a growing tablet market, Users who carry a cell phone and a tablet, might opt to use more advanced smartphone functions on a larger display device and leave the voice calling to the phone as initially intended along with perhaps the hotspot feature to allow the tablet to connect to the Web. Few days ago, HP announced its diminutive Veer phone, with the same idea in mind.
Very little details about the new smaller iPhone have been unveiled beside its codenamed N97 and “edge-to-edge” touch-based display and the device be running a new version of iOS that supports voice-based navigation. (Apple acquired Siri, a voice recognition concierge service last year). The new software is told to be available to older devices.
There were also rumors that Apple $99/year cloud storage service called MobileMe will be overhauled and would be offered for free to Apple iOS users. Having a depository of personal data would help Apple to re-enforce user retention capability for its ecosystem. MobileMe space might store iTunes purchased media contents for streaming so the local storage could be smaller to further cut the device hardware cost.
Apple is expected to make its phone related announcement in the Summer timeframe.
[Via WSJ]
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