New iPhone nano photo tips up, looks faaaake

By Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Wednesday, 24 December 2008 06:12

IT Industry - Market

Personally, I’d be much more impressed to see an updated Mac Mini and the long-fabled Mac netbook or netMac appear, coupled with a rotating touch screen (for Tablet PC functionality).

Seeing as Intel has a nettop dual-core Atom processor on the market already, which Intel could easily have crafted a mobile version thereof and given Apple special early access to, it’s not such an outlandish idea.

Perhaps slightly more outlandish is the idea that it could be dovetailed with the ability to run both the Mac OS X and the iPhone OS X, thus giving us all a smaller Mac and a bigger iPhone at the same time.

Given the fact netbooks are now appearing with built-in 3.5G modules, this netMac/iPhone combo could even make calls, although you’d likely want to use a Bluetooth headset rather than stick a 10-inch box to your face.

And, as a Mac, it could easily come with BootCamp, thus letting users have the benefit of a Windows and/or Linux installation too.

Seeing as Apple has no netbook, and seeing as Steve Jobs has rubbished the idea, which is his standard modus operandi before turning around and delivering that very thing (at least when it came to the iPod Video), it seems much more likely to me that a Mac netbook with tablet capabilities will appear before an iPhone nano does.

All of that said, Apple is so unpredictable that we don’t really have any idea what they’ll be releasing this time around, especially without its master showman Steven P. Jobs at the helm.

I’ve already speculated that Steve Jobs himself might be the ultimate “one more thing” to appear at Macworld, simply to say hello and prove to the world he’s not on the brink of setting up a new Apple store in the nether world, or perhaps even to surprise us all with his iPhone nano/Mac netbook/new Mac Mini or something else.

The crowd would go wild, after all, if Steve Jobs did turn up on stage, even if only for a short while, after having dampened expectations so very much beforehand.

So, we’ll all just have to wait and see what is demoed and unveiled, beyond the expected Mac OS X 10.6 update and potentially announcements of new iMacs with the Intel Core i7 processor.

And who knows? We might even get to hear about iPhone OS 3.0, with the much desired cut and paste, turn-by-turn GPS, notes synchronisation, Blackberry beating email experience and much more.

There’s less than two weeks to go now, and we’ll all know what was real, what was fake, and what no-one expected at all.