China Mobile claims a 4-inch iPhone will be launching in April

Rumors of another 4-inch smartphone from Apple have been popping up for a long time, but from what we’ve seen over the past few months, the company might actually be releasing a 4-inch iPhone in the near future. The more recent rumors suggest the smartphone will be released in the first half of next year, which was seemingly confirmed earlier this week through a leaked slide from a China Mobile presentation. According to the slide, Apple is planning to launch the 4-inch smartphone in China sometime in April, which lines up with a rumor that the company is planning an announcement event for some unknown products in March.

China Mobile is apparently planning for an April 2016 launch of a new 4-inch iPhone, a product launch calendar from Apple’s carrier partner has revealed. The rumored release date for a new, smaller iPhone model apparently comes from a presentation from China Mobile, spotted by MyDrivers. According to the site, the upper right box of the chart shown onscreen mentions a new Apple handset launching in April of 2016 While the characters to the right are difficult to read, AppleInsider can confirm that the presentation slide does say “Apple” in the text in question. In addition, the column above it does mention the month of April. However, it should be noted that in Mandarin, the word “iPhone” is typically written out in Chinese. The report was first discovered by GadgetzArena. The original report refers to the anticipated new handset as an “iPhone 7c,” but Apple typically updates its flagship handsets in the fall timeframe. It would seem unlikely that a handset branded “iPhone 7c” would debut before an “iPhone 7.” Instead, most media has referred to the rumored device as an “iPhone 6c,” based on the fact that the 4-inch smartphone is expected to feature many of the same components as the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6s series.