Recently, chatter has increased about the possibility of an ‘iPhone nano’ (a smaller lighter more-iPod-than-iPhone phone). I have no informer in a Taiwanese factory, nor saw one over someone’s shoulder at an airport neither do I have a friend who is a waiter at a restaurant who played with one. But, what I do have is two patients which have a certain Steven P. Jobs as the lead inventor. As we’ve seen before Jobs is intimately involved of every aspect of product and stair development.

So what does Apple say about this low end iPhone?
The first patent application 20070152979 is for “Text Entry Interface for a Portable Communication Device”. This is important because a phone the size of an iPod Nano is not going to be able to incorporate a touchscreen or sophisticated input device in the immediate future- So it’s back to the future with a scrollwheel. How do you dial a number or send a text with a scrollwheel I hear you ask– the answer is: with some difficulty! Steve reckons using visual feedback on the screen you can use the scroll wheel to dial numbers. Further, text input will be aided by sophisticated predictive text.

A method includes displaying a first tray and a second tray in a display of the portable communications device. The first tray is configured to display one of more characters that were selected by a user using a click wheel. The second tray includes a first plurality of icons that correspond to a set of characters and one or more recommended words. The first tray includes a first region in a graphical user interface and the second tray includes a second region in the graphical user interface. Scrolling through the first plurality of icons and the one or more recommended words occurs in accordance with one or more navigation commands received from a click wheel.

What this means is anyone’s guess, but what I think it means is that you select letters with the scroll wheel in the first ‘tray’ at the bottom of the screen and then words are displayed in the second ‘tray’ which can then be selected and entered. The third ‘tray’ contains the text message already entered.

The second patent application 20070155369 with Steve as first inventor is the enigmatically named ‘Replay Recommendations in a Text Entry Interface
‘. Now, this patent makes you wonder how Steve can make so much sense in an Apple keynote but make so little sense in a patent abstract.

A method includes receiving a current set of characters in response to a sequence of user commands. The current set of characters includes a current sequence of words. A respective word in the current sequence of words includes one or more characters in the current set of characters. The user commands include character entry commands. Additional user commands that specify characters to delete from the current set of characters and characters to add to the current set of characters are received. Replay recommendations for additional words to be added to the current set of characters in accordance with one or more deleted words that correspond to the deleted characters are provided.

These two patents indicate that the concept of a iPhone Nano has been seriously thought about at the highest levels at Apple and that Steven P. Jobs has been central to developing these ideas. Whether this phone gets made probably will have more to do with whether Apple thinks it can sell lots of them without eating into its other markets the iPhone and the iPod. Time will tell.

I’m a fan of the iPhone Nano, maybe all phones don’t have to be the swiss army knives that they are being made into and there is room for a phone that is just a phone– or rather just a phone and an iPod. The problem with the market is that although people may have two iPods, an iPod video for watching video and to contain their entire music collection and a Shuffle or Nano, they are unlikely to have two phones mainly because they are not (at the moment) allowed to have the same number (maybe that could change?).