Reliable sources told a sources’s brother’s girlfriend’s roommate’s dog’s owner’s manicurist’s magician that Sony may be working on an iPod Nano contender. While the body would be a modified design of the NW-A3000 series, new units would actually run smaller than the Nano and playback video for 8-10 hours at a time on a larger screen. Sizes range from 2-8GB with pricing potentially starting a bit higher than the Nano’s. Plans are for the the interface to stay the same. More

Just when we thought iPod integration in autos was the next big thing, there are rumors that car manufacturers are planning to integrate the iPhone as well. It’s the next logical step, so we’re not too surprised, but who’s going to be the first?

Well, someone wrote down a bunch of automaker’s names and put them all in a hat, lit the hat on fire, took a dump in the hat, and quickly pulled out the first legible slip and decided it was going to be the BMW 7-series. That’s what we hear so far, at least. More

Capping literally years of speculation on perhaps the most intensely followed unconfirmed product in Apple’s history — and that’s saying a lot — the iPhone has been announced today. Yeah, we said it: “iPhone,” the name the entire free world had all but unanimously christened it from the time it’d been nothing more than a twinkle in Stevie J’s eye (comments, Cisco?). Sweet, glorious specs of the 11.6 millimeter device (that’s frickin’ thin, by the way) include a 3.5-inch 480 x 320 touchscreen display with multi-touch support and a proximity sensor to turn off the screen when it’s close to your face, 2 megapixel cam, 4GB or 8 GB of storage, Bluetooth 2.0 with EDR and A2DP, WiFi that automatically engages when in range, and quad-band GSM radio with EDGE. Perhaps most amazingly, though, it somehow runs OS X with support for Widgets, Google Maps, and Safari, and iTunes (of course) with CoverFlow out of the gate. A partnership with Yahoo will allow all iPhone customers to hook up with free push IMAP email. Apple quotes 5 hours of battery life for talk or video, with a full 16 hours in music mode — no word on standby time yet. In a twisted way, this is one rumor mill we’re almost sad to see grind to a halt; after all, when is the next time we’re going to have an opportunity to run this picture? The 4GB iPhone will go out the door in the US as a Cingular exclusive for $499 on a two-year contract, 8GB for $599. Ships Stateside in June, Europe in fourth quarter, Asia in 2008.

Chinese company Meizu has already released an iPhone copycat, and reviewers are claiming that the Meizu M8 player is “everything the iPhone should’ve been.”

From the promo site, Meizu offers:

The Meizu m8 Player - The Music Phone

The Meizu M8 is going to be a music phone (57×105x11.5mm) for the GSM and TD networks with a 3.3-inch 720×480 pixel VGA+ touch sensitive screen, 3 mega-pixel camera, ARM11 CPU capable of recording video in 30FPS utilizing the entire screen resolution, Bluetooth and TV Out. Supposedly, it will also run the latest version of Microsoft’s Windows for mobile devices; Windows CE 6.0. After the release of the official concept renders, the M8 has already been stamped as an Apple iPhone clone.

It’s funny to see this out so quick as just yesterday I watched Steve Jobs say that the iPhone is five years ahead of the competition in his iPhone keynote address. How about five days?

Pablo Gonzalez, a Prada shoe-wearing cellphone connoisseur who jumps from one new handset to the next, is ready to ditch his $1,000 touch-screen cellphone for Apple’s iPhone when it becomes available in June.

Tark Abed, on the other hand, just got the new Samsung BlackJack smart phone a month ago. The industrial designer at Palo Alto-based Speck Design is not keen on spending as much as $500, even though he finds the iPhone’s sleek interface alluring and innovative.

“I upgraded to an unlimited data plan and got the BlackJack for $149,” he said, “and that’s a lot of phone already for $149.”

Their divergent views underscore why Apple Inc.’s recently announced and much-hyped cellphone is all the rage and why, at the same time, incumbent rivals are stirred, but say they are not shaken.

The iPhone got everybody - from techie bloggers to late-night TV hosts - talking when it arrived fashionably late on the wireless communications scene a month ago. Would-be rivals are welcoming the challenge, but questioning Apple’s assertion that the iPhone is “revolutionary.”

Apple’s competitors predict that even as the gadget will probably boost the company’s fortunes, it will have limited market share and fall short of the successes Apple has seen with its iPod portable music player. They contend that some of the phone’s much-touted features - such as its touch screen, movement sensors and music player - are not innovative or new. More