The iPhone nano is back. The vaporware – part handset, part iPod – has re-emerged more than a year after first speculation. The newest iteration comes from China.
The latest rumor is that iDealsChina is producing a case for the unnamed product that supposedly will be unveiled at Macworld in January.
The Chinese company, which MacRumors says has “a very mixed track record” when it comes to leaking news of actual products, notes the case’s dimensions “have the same height as the just release Nano but wider and thicker and with the same iPhone 3G contours.”
The reports come as analysts suggest Apple won’t unveil a new product category at Macworld. The tradeshow has been used by CEO Steve Jobs to launch new devices.
In 2007, a JP Morgan analyst launched a thousand blog posts by writing Apple was about to unveil “a cheaper version of the iPhone in the fourth quarter that could be based on its iPod nano music player.”
Avi Greengart, a handset analyst for Current Analysis, told Cult of Mac, rumors of a smaller iPhone rank among the top three rumors during the annual “silly season” leading up to Macworld. Other unconfirmed reports that never seem to die: a tablet Mac and a subscription-based music service.
Ed Sutherland is a veteran technology journalist who first heard of Apple when they grew on trees, Yahoo was run out of a Stanford dorm and Google was an unknown upstart. Since then, Sutherland has covered the whole technology landscape, concentrating on tracking the trends and figuring out the finances of large (and small) technology companies.
