Paul Thurrott suggests iPhone Nano

Paul Thurrott brings up the notion of an iPod-less iPhone.

Indeed, once you get rid of most of the storage space–I’m thinking 1 GB would do it for whatever random photos you might take–you can also dispense with a lot of the battery, since that’s pretty much only needed for media playback anyway. You could therefore make a phone-only iPhone–the iPhone nano–that was about one-half to two-thirds the size of the existing device, while retaining the same basic proportions. A smaller phone would be highly desirable to a lot of people, methinks.

This would be a great idea, except that a smaller phone would mean a smaller screen, which would mean a smaller everything, since the screen is the UI. Also, a smaller battery really doesn’t make sense, because playing videos isn’t the only thing that whacks the battery life. Doing all your email on the iPhone, as I now am, needs having a nice big battery in there.

However, I do think there’s a market for something like this. Sandy, who’s now desperately in search of an iPhone after he saw mine¹ remarked that he only wanted it for it’s phone/Internet capabilities and not for music or movies. So an iPhone Nano would actually make sense for him. But, of course, I doubt Apple would confuse their product line with a similarly sized but technologically inferior iPhone… unless it was a different color or something. Preferably not shit-brown.

1. Granted, it hasn’t helped that every time he comes by I pull the iPhone out and show him a cool new feature I’ve discovered.↩