A China Times article from Friday reports that Apple allegedly is planning to launch a new iPhone which will compete with the low-cost phone market. While this may or may not be the case, I am not sure how BGR takes this as a sign that an “Entry-level ‘iPhone nano’ [is] again rumored to launch this year.” If all the rumors pan out to be true, Apple will make their flagship iPhone bigger, introduce a smaller iPad, and release the iPhone nano. In other words: analysts and bloggers are hoping to see Tim Cook lose his mind and muck around with everything.

I’m relying on Google Chrome to translate the Chinese (Traditional Han) into English, so maybe Zach Epstein sees something on the China Times article that I don’t. What I know is that Apple’s been very careful about maintaining the screen dimensions as well as resolution backwards-compatibility of its devices, which has led to some screen resolutions that look really odd on paper. (If you were a manufacturer, would you choose to produce something 2048-by-1536 on a whim?)

This is Apple we’re talking about. A supply chain rumor about a cheaper iPhone doesn’t mean apple is going to release a new iPhone form-factor which would require a new category of apps in the iTunes store. On the other hand, I would believe that Apple could ship out a retooled iPhone 3G for the low-cost market. Will they? I’ll wait for the announcement.

Do you think Apple should further fragment its apps to appeal to the low-cost phone market? (Or produce a new phone without access to apps?) Let us know in the comments section below.