SAN FRANCISCO—Will the next iPhone be thinner, less expensive, perhaps cooler? Will it come with new features such as video chat and a global positioning system? For months, speculation has swirled.

On Monday Steve Jobs, Apple’s chief executive, was expected to end the guessing game and unveil the second version of the iPhone at Apple’s developer conference in San Francisco.

This is not just any updated product. Some analysts say the future of Apple depends on the iPhone becoming a consumer hit of global proportions.

“Apple’s stock is going to go where the iPhone goes,” said Andy Hargreaves, senior research analyst with Pacific Crest Securities. “It’s the new growth driver.”

The key question, they say, is whether Apple, based in Cupertino, California, cuts the price of the iPhone to boost sales dramatically.

On June 29, 2007, Apple began selling the 8-gigabyte iPhone at $599 in the US with lines of people standing outside Apple stores. It quickly became a cultural icon and changed how people viewed mobile phones.

The iPhone is a combination mobile phone, digital entertainment player and an Internet surfing gadget.

The phone hasn’t been without controversy. Fewer than three months after it went on sale, Apple dropped the price $200, angering customers who had already bought it. And the company frustrated software developers by limiting the kinds of development that could be done on the phone. Meanwhile, some began using the phone “unlocked,” without AT&T Inc.’s cell phone service, and with software applications not approved by Apple. Some of those people found their iPhones did not work after Apple issued a software update.

Apple has tried to mollify the grousing. Owners angry about the price drop received a $100 credit. The company created a software developer’s kit for making features and services for the phone, and Jobs is expected Monday to launch an iPhone “applications store” that will sell programs made by outside developers.

That was all prelude.

Riding on the iPhone’s shoulders is the expectation that if it is a big success, it could help drive more sales of Macintosh computers, analysts say. The popularity of the iPod is often credited with the rebound of the Mac because of its “halo effect:” People who buy iPods have a good experience with Apple products and consider buying a Mac. But iPod sales have been flat in recent quarters.

“If Apple can build up iPhone volumes up, lets say 20, 30, 40 million, then you will have an iPhone halo effect,” said Charlie Wolf, vice president at Needham & Co. “The iPhone becomes the crucial driver to Apple’s continued gains in PC market share. And that’s the real endgame in my mind.”

The consensus is Jobs will announce that iPhone 2 will capitalize on a faster network as well as come with software programs to make the phone more attractive to both business users and consumers.

But the chief way to boost sales would be a price drop, Wolf said. Some analysts have speculated that Apple will sell two versions of the phone—a higher priced one that capitalizes on the faster network and a less expensive one—as low as $99—for the older version of the phone.

In one scenario, carriers, such as Apple’s US partner AT&T, could subsidize the price of the phone, with the idea that they would make up the subsidy from monthly subscribers, analysts said.

Apple “can reposition the current iPhone as an entry level device,” said Charles Golvin, principal analyst at Forrester Research. “That will make iPhone ownership possible for people for whom the current pricing is too great an impediment.”

But Apple has to be careful that any price cut doesn’t cannibalize its other products, such as the iPod Touch, an iPod with Internet surfing capabilities, which is at $499 for the 32-gigabyte version. Apple now sells an 8-gigabyte iPhone for $399 and a 16-gigabyte version for $499.

Other than a price cut, Apple has said it plans to boost the iPhone to make it more business friendly. The hope is that if more business people begin to use the iPhone, they might begin to rally for Macintosh computers inside the office.

“The iPhone is viewed as a Trojan Horse into corporations, where the Macintosh has barely penetrated,” Wolf said.

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SAN FRANCISCO—Will the next iPhone be thinner, less expensive, perhaps cooler? Will it come with new features such as video chat and a global positioning system? For months, speculation has swirled.

WINSTON Garcia is no doubt every consumer’s idol today despite his frustrated bid to wrest control of the management of Manila Electric Co. (Meralco) from the Lopezes. Every consumer in the franchise areas served by Meralco should heap praises on this Cebuano for his untiring efforts in taking on the Lopezes whose management, as Rene June Mendez wrote the editor of this paper, is “inefficient and covetous.”