THEORY: iPod Mini will reincarnate as the Apple iPhone.

[Pennstate]

It all makes sense now. For apple to come in and grab the Cell Phone market, it needs to be bold and make a huge splash...Kind of like how they did it with the Mini.

There are several reasons why the Mini would be a good template for the iPhone:


Size: The size of the Mini is perfect for a cell phone. Perhaps as a flip phone since Apple likes to keep its sleek & clean look. Number buttons on the outside just distract the clean scroll wheel look.

Color: Cell phone colors have been boring. Apple knows that the 18-25 crowd sees the cell phone as a fashion accessory. Making a line of colored iPhones like the Minis will be a huge hit. And yes, pink will return Now if Apple had kept the Mini line, then the colored iPhones would not be as distinctive. ANother reason is that the sales of minis have leveled off. The bulk of the people who are interested in the mini had already bought one and probably won't buy another even if Apple increases the capacity or adds a color screen...video etc.

Battery life: THe 2G Mini had a 18-hr battery life. If Apple uses Flash memory instead of HD, more space will be available for a bigger battery. SInce flash mem uses less power, it's not inconceivable that Apple can still deliver at least 12 hours of playback on the iPhone.

If Apple can convert the Mini into an iPhone, I will have my credit card ready... no matter how many iPods I already own That's been consistant with Apple's strategy in developing new iPods --- Making sure that new iPods are marketable to existing iPod owners.

No worries people, Apple is not that stupid to trash one of their most successful marketing strategies in its history.

[t3homni]

There's already that Motorola one that supports iTunes, so there's no point.

[if6was9]

the motorola rokr is another new phone, just happens to have itunes stuck on. i think pennstate makes some interesting points... i think that apple will go after the mobile market, particularly as this is a focus for other competitors such as sony. a true ipod phone would sell by the bucket loads.

[golfer931]

i heard that the itunes for the phone has already been hacked. so you will probably be able to put it on your own phone soon.

[Jesse Hollington]

Personally, I don't see Apple going into the phone market directly. Manufacturing cell phones is a very complicated business. The regulatory requirements and different sort of engineering required to actually build good cell phones is outside of the scope of Apple's expertise right now, and I don't see Apple as being the kind of company that would want to risk producing an inferior product.

The partnership with Motorola makes more sense at this point, as Motorola is arguably the Apple of the cell phone marketplace (or at least one of them, and I'm talking in terms of market penetration and product line at least).

I think for Apple to get into a market that they know little about in terms of either marketing or design would be a foolish and risky move on their part.

[AlexTheBrian]

wooooooow.

this thread makes me smile.

[kornchild2002]

Especially since it was written two years before the first iPhone ever came out. It's funny to think that the rumors of an Apple phone went back long before the first iPhone was ever released.

[GriffTechFan]

Very well predicted, sorry to the guy who said apple wouldnt go into the phone market, it has probably turned out to be one of apple's most valuable moves ever. The iphone has changed the mobile phone industry, being the first fully touch screen handheld computer that makes phone calls. pretty much every mobile phone manufacturer since has bought out their own version of the iphone, still apple was the first and still the best by far in my eyes.

[kornchild2002]

Sorry but Apple wasn't the first company to release a touchscreen phone and they definitely weren't the first to come up with a phone that is essentially a pocket PC. Palm and even RIM came out with their own iterations years before the iPhone. In fact, Palm had a Windows Mobile device and one running their own Palm OS going back to 2005 (and even before that), a full 2 years before the iPhone even came out.

Apple did not invent the market nor did they invent "the first fully touch screen handheld computer that makes phone calls." The iPhone did change the way smartphones were looked at by creating a large app ecosystem and bringing the size of the phone down to something that wasn't a huge brick. They were definitely influential but they weren't the first to do anything. For years, Palm even took the approach of using their PC software to sync everything over to their devices. They tried to create a relationship between their handheld devices and PC software before iTunes and iPods were released. Apple did it better but you get the idea.