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Computerworld - Apple is working on a line of smaller, less-expensive iPhones, a move one analyst said the company "would be stupid not to" pursue.

Several media outlets, including the Bloomberg news service and the Wall Street Journal, have cited unnamed sources in recent days who claim that Apple may launch a smaller iPhone -- dubbed "iPhone Nano" by some in a tip to Apple's Lilliputian iPod Nano music player -- later this year.

The new models could be offered to carriers at half the price of the current iPhone -- carriers now pay an average of $625 for each iPhone -- making it feasible for them to fully subsidize the smartphone when customers commit to a long-term contract. Alternately, Apple could price the iPhone Nano as low as $200 without a service contract.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the smaller phones would offer little or no storage space for mobile apps. Instead, the devices would rely on cloud-based services to store their music and photo collections, stream movies and television programs, and run online-based apps.

Apple made a similar shift last year with Apple TV when it replaced the $229 original model's internal hard drive with only enough memory to stream content, then dropped the device's price to $99.

The cloud-based services for a new iPhone would be based on Apple's MobileMe, some or all of which would be offered free-of-charge, said the Wall Street Journal, and presumably run from servers at the company's $1 billion North Carolina data center.

One analyst said such a strategy not only is common among phone makers, but would let Apple better compete with lower-priced smartphones running Google's Android operating system.

"This is a typical strategy, where you start at the high end, then move down to the needs of the lower-end customers," said Jack Gold, an analyst at J. Gold Associates. "It would be a pre-emptive strategy on Apple's part to counter Android, which is clearly gaining market share."

Estimates by Gartner Research put Android as the world's second-best-selling smartphone OS, with a 23% of the market in 2010, up from just 4% the year before. Apple's iOS, meanwhile, accounted for 16% of the smartphone market last year.