We may be in for quite the shakeup of the iOS world if Ethan Smith’s new article in the Wall Street Journal has any weight to it. Smith makes some pretty bold claims about a new, less-expensive iPhone which he states has an edge-to-edge screen and weighs quite a bit less than the current iPhone 4.

This lines up pretty well with a lot of the ‘iPhone Nano‘ rumors we’ve been seeing for years, and it’s certainly intriguing to see the Wall Street Journal putting its stamp on the story.

Presumably, this smaller iPhone would behave more like a data “access point” than a place to store all of your music, movies, and books. Those, says Smith, could be managed by Apple’s MobileMe service (which would be turning into a free cloud computing service alongside the launch of the new phone), therefore eliminating the need for large amounts of storage space on the actual device.

How well this would work is a topic still up for debate, but you know how it goes: Apple always finds a way.

I suppose we’ll just have to wait and see what Jobs (or Cook) has up his sleeve in the coming months. The WSJ article hints at a summer release for both the micro phone and the revamped MobileMe service.