Apple have announced a special event to be held on September 12th at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. Insiders say that there is going to be a plethora of new and updated product and a very special announcement at the end, which Steve Jobs likes to do.

Word on the street is that there will be newly refreshed IMacs and IPods. One of the big announcements will be that Itunes will get to sell IMovies initially from Disney Studios including Pixar.

This may not be real but it is the first time I have seen the iChat Mobile moniker.

The big news of the day is rumored to be the new Apple IPhone or iChat Mobile. According to American Technology Research:

“Our research indicates that an Apple-designed smart phone has moved from concept to prototype and recently has progressed to near completion as a production unit,” analyst Shaw Wu told clients in a research note on Tuesday. “We believe this smart phone has been in development for over 12 months and has overcome substantial challenges including design, interference, battery life and other technical glitches.”

Apple cell phone is real and ready for production - analyst
The rational for announcing it early is that because of FCC rules, the phone would need to be disclosed to the FCC as part of the certification. This obviously would lead to a similar incident to last weeks Toshiba Zune Player announcement being unveiled in a less than glamous fashion. This is something that Jobs would want to avoid.

However the iChat Mobile moniker aside from being a 3G capable phone, also has insiders speculating that it also has the ability to support VOIP and peer to peer services such as iChat Video has now. Apparently the phone has a small colour screen and would make sense a video camera for video chatting.

Nevertheless, Wu said, he is “very positive” about Apple’s prospect for building a material smart phone business given its strong brand name, loyal customer base, unique user experience, large installed base of 58 million iPods, and what he estimates to be about 300 million iTunes users.

Apple has all the ingredients for a very successful consumer mobile phone, especially if it is able to leverage products like the iChat, Itunes, IPhoto, the ILife Suite in the same way it does with the IPod.

Apple has the potential to once again usher in a new era in personal mobile devices. Couple this with iChat and VOIP and it makes sense.

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