According to Le Journal du Geek, the much-fabled iPhone Nano is coming in June, and will be debuted by none other than Jobs himself. The new, meaty bit: to make it smaller (for the sake of the whole “Nano” bit), they say the home button has been moved to the side – but that 3G, GPS, and WiFi get to stay!
Okay, look. The whole iPhone Nano thing is bananas. I’m pretty sure people have been gossiping about the possibility of a smaller iPhone before the iPhone even existed (Newton Nano!), so at this point debunking the rumors is just marginally less silly than making them in the first place. Rather than debunking this new one, we’ll tell it how we see it and let you do the decision making.
Why it might be true:
- It would let them shave some size off the iPhone without changing the screen size. All previous rumors have implied that the screen size would change, nullifying the rumor right off the line. iPhone apps are designed with the specs of the current screen in mind. Sure, you could just match the resolution on a smaller screen (quite easily), but the small fonts and tiny buttons would make the user experience pretty nasty.
- The home button being on the side wouldn’t break anything.
Why it’s probably not:
- If they shave down everything around the touchscreen, where do the speaker, headphone jack, and camera module go? They currently fill the internals above the touchscreen – and those things aren’t exactly small (in a relative sense).
- They’d only be shaving down an inch or so, and only off the height. That doesn’t really justify the “Nano” name, nor would it really justify all of the research and production work required for such a change. With all of the aforementioned components needing new places, the entire handset would need to be re-engineered.
- Why? Why would Apple make this? It’d cost right around the same as the current iPhone to make, and require a good amount of research and development (read: $) – all to shave an inch or so off one dimension?
Like we said earlier, we’ll leave it at that and let you decide whether or not it’s shenanigans.
Just kidding. It’s shenanigans.