How would an iPhone nano work?

The rumours of a cut-down iPhone that is smaller and cheaper persist and every day there seems to be some new news story or blog about it. Actually, there is no news because Apple doesn't say anything about products that may or may not be in development. So is there an iPhone nano in the pipeline? It seems very unlikely and I'd say that it is a 99% certainty that there isn't.

There are several reasons for this and one is that the iPhone is all about apps. There are hundreds of thousands of them and there are some amazing ones that are really good. Without any apps, the iPhone would not be anywhere near as attractive. It would look expensive and unexciting.

Imagine an iPhone nano with a smaller screen. How would all those apps work? They wouldn't. If the screen is shrunk down even by just a bit so it is 75% the size of the current iPhone many of the current apps wouldn't fit on the screen. Making a bigger iPhone is fine because like the iPad, apps could be scaled up or displayed in the centre of the screen with a border. How do you make apps fit a screen 25% smaller though?

If you shrunk the screen and used the retina display on the current iPhone you could end up with a small-screen iPhone that had the same number of pixels as the original iPhone. This would allow apps to run OK, however, many iPhone apps use very small text and it is often at the limit of my vision. If the screen was made smaller these apps with tiny text would be unusable because they would be unreadable.

Just as the iPod nano is like a tiny iPod Touch without apps, an iPhone nano would have to be like an iPhone without apps, or at least limited to very basic ones bundled with it like contacts and calendar. Even email would be difficult on a smaller screen. And what about the on-screen keyboard? Would it be as good if it was smaller?

Of course, Android is available on many different screen sizes including small ones, but the difference is that from the start app developers have been creating apps for screens of different sizes. Have iPhone app developers been told to create apps for a smaller screen? That's one rumour I've not heard. I think app developers would be the first to know if there was an iPhone nano coming out.