Form Factor of the iPhone Lite
John Gruber’s speculation about an iPhone Lite:
A new, lower-priced, smaller, and more adorable iPhone, with more or less the same technical specs as the original iPhone. Given that those specs include the 320 × 480 display, I wouldn’t expect something tiny, but remember that the original iPod Mini was “just” 35 percent smaller by volume than the then-current full-sized iPod. Shrink the iPhone’s forehead and chin and make it thinner — maybe a lot thinner — is what I’m thinking. Existing iPhone apps would run just fine on the new device, as it’d have similar, if not identical, CPU performance and RAM to previous full-sized iPhones.
Until this post I found it difficult envisioning a lite version of the iPhone, largely because I wasn’t separating form from features in my mind. An iPhone with the same form factor but lesser specs wouldn’t, in my opinion, be flying off the shelves the way that the current model is. If Apple were to differentiate the second model exteriorly the way that it does the iPod Nano, the case may be somewhat different. And much more interesting.
