Palm Pre, Who? Recession, What? Meet The $99 iPhone.

picture-15Alongside its unveiling of the new iPhone today at the WWDC keynote in San Francisco, Apple also unveiled a secret weapon in its quest to dominate the smartphone market: A cheaper iPhone.

This new iPhone will be the iPhone 3G. While the newly released iPhone 3G S will offer more storage, and presumably a faster processor, more RAM and faster download speeds, this iPhone will have the same specs as the last one. But what you get for this is one hell of a price: $99.

This undercuts the price of the current iPhone models by $100 and more importantly, also undercuts the cost of the Palm Pre by that amount (and even more without the Pre’s $100 mail-in rebate). $99 is a very nice sweet spot for a device that remember, will also have a access to the App Store’s over 50,000 apps.

This $99 iPhone will be on sale starting today.