iPhone 5 and iPhone 4S? New clues suggest Apple will unveil both.

Well, regardless of the name, we all know an iPhone 5 is coming, probably sooner rather than later – and perhaps as soon as September. The professional prognosticators have predicted it, the blogs have published data on it, and Apple's annual release schedule more or less lines up perfectly. But did you know the release of the iPhone 5 could be paired with the release of a retooled, less expensive version of the current iPhone – something (possibly) called the iPhone 4S?

According to Fortune, on Monday morning Deutsche Bank analyst Chris Whitmore sent a note to clients, telling them to expect a pair of Apple phones in the fall. "With Nokia and RIM struggling," Whitmore wrote, "the time is right for Apple to aggressively penetrate the mid-range smart-phone market (i.e. $300-500 category) to dramatically expand its [total addressable market] and market share."

This makes a lot of sense. Until relatively recently, the Apple iPhone was very much a prestige product, marketed to image-conscious city-dwellers, and emblazoned with a price tag to match. But over the past couple of years, Apple has ratcheted up the volume of iPhones it unloads, and even expanded to Verizon, gobbling up chunks of the global smartphone market in the process. A cheaper iPhone is a logical next step.

And it could help improve Apple's lot overseas. "In the US, most cellphones are subsidized by carriers with contracts that allow them to recoup the cost of the phone in monthly payments," notes Philip Elmer-DeWitt of Fortune. However, he adds, "there are large swaths of the world – especially in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, where iPhone penetration is low – where customers prefer to pay the full cost of the phone upfront."

Meanwhile, bloggers have continued to debate whether the iPhone 5 – not the iPhone 4S, which would presumably get the same casing as the iPhone 4 – will ship in a new shape. Earlier this month, the usually-reliable tech site Boy Genius Report reported that the iPhone would get a "radical new case design." Who knows? Maybe it will look like a big old teardrop, as reported.