Owning an iPhone automatically drafts you into the war of 2008: iPhone vs Blackberry. Thankfully it's more like a massacre than a fair fight, and therefore it's not really a war I anticipate will go on for much longer. The only blackberry fan I haven't been able to sway so far has conspiracy theories about Apple that are so complex it'd be easier to see how the Roswell aliens shot JFK to cause 9/11. There's just no way to argue with a theory like that.

The Apple rumour du jour is the iPhone nano; a smaller version of the iPhone 3G, because everyone knows that smaller is better. This doesn't make much sense to me. Having to use the touch keyboard on a smaller screen would be frustrating, and there's no real need for the device to be smaller. Proponents of the theory state that the intention of the smaller size is to reduce costs but this also makes less sense since (1) smaller is usually more expensive, and (2) Apple have never been one to worry about cost as a product factor.

There is an alternate rumour going around that I do like: making a bigger device. This might seem counter-intuitive, but if you think about it such a device could do so much. It would function as an affordable entry into the tablet PC market, one that has always been full of good ideas but lacking in cost-effective products (mostly due to UI based issues, which are generally a result of running Windows). They would allow Apple to compete in the netbook space, providing a low cost computing device without the downsides of most netbooks (I imagine a touch keyboard working better than the keyboard on my EEE PC does). Assuming the screen resolution was up to typical Apple standards it would also make for a mighty fine portable reading device, akin to the Kimble. More importantly it would provide a whole new platorm that can not only leverage the apps currently being sold on the App store, but if you add a USB port or two allow developers to create products that weren't feasible before.

I imagine technicians carrying them around, plugging then into equipment via a USB interface and retrieving real time diagnostic information. I see them in the hand of every nurse and doctor in a hospital, not only allowing them to display a patients vitals in real time but allowing them instant access to things such as medical history and scan results. Waiters would use them to take your order, or better yet you'd use your own at a restaurant to display the menu, complete with nutritional information and history of each dish, and then place the order yourself.

Essentially I see such a device being a realisation of the PADD from Star Trek. One universal commodity device that will become so ubiquitous that we won't be able to imagine life without it.