By Jaime Rivera | February 13, 2011 8:48 PM
The Wall Street Journal’s own Yukari Iwatani Kane is famous for being Apple’s choice for confirmed leaks. This time, she takes her time to confirm that Apple is working on a less expensive iPhone and that it’ll be half the size of the current iPhone 4. This iPhone Nano or mini is dubbed as the N97 project, and is intended to be sold along side the current iPhone flagship device with the idea of competing with other smartphones at cheaper price points. Whether this means that Apple will drop its current strategy of selling last year’s hardware under a cheaper price, like is currently the case with the iPhone 3GS being sold at $49 after a contract is yet to be seen.
Along side this leak, we also get into some MobileMe love. Rumors have Apple considering dropping the $99 a year price tag and offering their current sync services for free. A boost over what we currently find in Microsoft Exchange services, MobileMe allows you to not only sync PIM information, but also your photo gallery, files and even find your stolen iPhone. What’s hot about this section of the news is also reading that Apple intends to also add music streaming services to MobileMe. Not sure if this will mean you can stream your home’s music to your device over the cloud, but this sure would be a great way to keep your storage usage for apps and games. We’ll be following up on this as rumors become a reality.
Update: WSJ has just updated their post to include more details on the iPhone Nano, Mini, or whatever its name will be. It seems the new device will not only be significantly lighter than the iPhone 4, but it will also sport an edge-to-edge screen and even voice controlled navigation. Could this be another hint into what we sould expect from the iPhone 5 and iOS 5 too? Time will tell.
