Call it mini or Nano, it amounts to
the same thing: a cheaper iPhone. To make sense of either name, this
much-rumored product would also have to be smaller – which would be odd, since
buyers of the full-size iPhone are told it’s worth all that money because it’s
so slim and compact. But who’s counting?
Investment analysts are. They’re not so
much speculating that it’s happening as advising that it should be. Apple is
beginning to lose ground to Android in smartphone market share, and as much as
the company has always been about making great products for the discerning few
rather than OK products for the uncaring masses. It would still be crazy to let
its mobile dominance slip away for want of a cut-price model for people who
don’t have $750+ to spend on a phone is a huge demographic.
Look,
huge talking Item’s Pantone-inspired iPhone is appealing
With the iPhone 4 and 4S, preserved in
Apple’s current line-up as lower-cost alternatives to the iPhone 5, reportedly
selling extremely well – some estimates even put them close to the iPhone 5’s
numbers – there seems to be a gap in the market for a more affordable Apple
phone. And in a market that already parses ‘more affordable Apple phone’ as
‘Samsung phone’, Apple would surely be wise to fill that gap rather than let
someone else do it, mentioning no names.
Tim Cook has hinted that he gets the point,
telling Bernstein analyst Tony Sacconaghi two years ago – yes, that’s how long
these rumors have been around – that Apple products shouldn’t be ‘just for the
rich’.
What could Tim take out of an iPhone to
make it cheaper? Up to a point, simply rolling back to the spec of a one or two
or three-year-old model will do it. But Apple hates making its software
compatible with any product on which the paint is fully dry, so it’s hard to
see it going back very far; and it needs a better sales pitch than ‘You know,
the old one’.
The iPad mini is essentially an iPad 2
crammed into a slimmer and lighter case, with the compromise of a smaller
screen of a lower quality than current models. If something similar could be
done with the iPhone, and shave more than a negligible amount off the price
while maintaining a good margin (and in the US, a fat subsidy from the network
carriers who sell it, locked, to consumers how are now prohibited by law from
switching provider), it could be an attractive product on the shelf. Enough
needs to be wrong with the cheap iPhone to put off anyone who could stretch
their budget to the expensive one if they chose to. As with the iPad mini, a
non-Retina screen would be a good start, reducing bulk, weight and battery
usage as well as cost while leaving the iPhone proper looking crisper. But
Apple already knows the difference is lost on many users.
Silent
type: TJ Kohli’s ultra-minimalist edge-to-edge glazed iPhone concept doesn’t
give much away. But it could be full of stars
That means more will have to go. The extra
row of icons from the iPhone 5’s tall screen is one candidate. Before its
launch, Tim Cook used to boast that Android developers had to cater for
multiple screen sizes and shapes, while there was ‘only one iPhone’. This
argument began to look suspect once there two. Still, continuing to sell an
iPhone 4-shaped iPhone would be no worse than continuing to sell the iPhone 4.
But if there are going to be two iPhones,
why not make one of them a different size altogether? Maybe it could be truly
mini, with just three icons across and five down, or all the way Nano, with two
across, four down and a lanyard for your key ring. Almost anything is possible.
Thus farm, there’s been no purported supply
chain leak of smaller iPhone casings, which may or may not mean no such thing
is close to production. So there’s not much to go on. Prototypes revealed in
the recent Apple/Samsung court cases show that a number of completely different
iPhone designs have been considered, some of which might still be on the
drawing board; but all of them have the same screen format. Something else they
seem to have in common is a metal case, a feature of every current iOS product.
One thing, then, we can be pretty sure of is that an iPhone mini would be made
of aluminum. Naturally, one of the most popular rumors is that it’ll be
plastic.
It’s been claimed that this suggestion is
supported by a recent Apple patent filing describing a plastic phone. But the
patent only concerns a method of preventing the flash from a built-in camera
bouncing back from a built-in camera bouncing back into a device through a
plastic panel. Since the camera in the iPhone 5 is mounted in a plastic panel,
we can probably all stop shouting ‘They’re going to make a plastic iPhone!’
now.
Not
this one: There’s many a slip’ twixt drawing board and Apple Store. Here are
several
Still, anyone who remembers the warm, curvy
3GS would welcome a plastic iPhone mini. One like the concept below left, for
example, created by Item, a product design studio based in London and Paris
(designedbyitem.com). Inspired by Pantone color chip, the two-tone case looks
lovely to hold. And if you don’t fancy plastic, this could be the same matt
dyed aluminum as on eth iPod touch.
But would this feel like going backwards
for Apple? The only way forwards, surely, is towards an ever more austere
minimalism. That’s the direction taken by TJ Kohli, a user interface designer
from Atlanta, Georgia, with the concept on the right – originally proposed for
the next major iPhone release, but surely well suited to a stripped-down model.
This mini-monolith could ditch almost all the features of a modern iPhone and
still exert an inscrutably mesmerizing attraction over the budget smartphone
buyer.
