Today’s Hot Rumor: New Apple i-Etch A Sketch redefines collaborative doodling; and more!

Did you hear? The new Verizon Wireless iPhone is launching at CES! No wait, Apple doesn’t show up to CES. Nor would it ever let a partner announce a new Apple product in its stead, not when Steve Jobs merely has to snap his fingers to get the media hordes to descend upon whatever press conference or Mac event he cares to hold. Where were we? Oh yes… The CDMA iPhone won’t come out at CES. It will come out sometime in January! Er… Perhaps not January, but definitely sometime after CES!

Never mind that I could say the world will end sometime after CES, and I’d be right. Never mind that two straight years of VZW iPhone stories have been dead wrong. There are people making some preposterous claims here. (You can find them yourself in Google—I won’t bother to link to them.) One report quotes an analyst saying that there is a 95% chance a VZW iPhone will appear in 2011. A 95% chance? It’s not as if the consumer electronics industry has a half-life—a 95% probability a silicon atom will decay thus creating a new iPhone. Either you have inside information or you don’t. I think it’s safe to say people are just guessing.

The annoying thing is that this year they may actually be right. Come June or perhaps later, Steve Jobs may just pull the tarp off a new iPhone that will work on VZW’s network. My guess is that phone won’t be a CDMA-only phone, but a long-term evolution (LTE) phone that happens to be backwards compatible to CDMA. My guess is that the phone won’t be ready for some time if Apple does launch it by the 2011 holiday season it will have pulled off a supply-chain coup. But these are all just guesses. I believe they’re educated guesses (based on factors I outline here), but guesses nonetheless. Feel free to disregard them because I don’t know squat.

Bu it’s becoming painfully obvious how guesses easily turn into rumors, which turn into ‘reports’, which only later turn into bunk. Apparently one needs only sneeze the word “Verizon” in a Cupertino Denny’s bathroom to start a chain reaction generating headlines from the most technical of device blogs all the way up to the Wall Street Journal. If you ask me it sounds fun. So I’ve decided to start a few rumors myself. You tell me if they’re any less believable than the VZW iPhone:

1) You were hoping for VZW iPhone, but Apple has even bigger plans. In a few short months, Apple, in partnership with Ohio Art Company, will introduce the new i-Etch A Sketch 4G, the first 4G-enabled 2-dimensional graphing device with collaborative doodling technology. Using a revolutionary aluminum-powder-and-polystyrene-bead display and highly versatile dual-knob and hidden-stylus user interface, the new i-Etch A Sketch will allow the next generation of artists not only to render stunning dual-tone images, but also share them with their friends and social networking sites using the Verizon’s new lighting-fast 4G LTE network. Best of all, Apple’s new DoodleTime application enables real-time collaboration among up to four VZW subscribers. You and friends together can draw that unicorn leaping through a monochrome rainbow. With less than 30 milliseconds of latency, it’s like being in the same room!

2) As I type these words, Huawei and ZTE’s handpicked Congressmen and Senators are taking their seats in the U.S. Capitol. It will take years if not decades before these freshmen lawmakers rise to power, taking over key committees, positioning themselves to influence key legislation. But every good paranoid plot requires patience. As they maneuver they’ll give no hint of their true intentions. In fact, they’ve been brainwashed so they themselves are unaware of their mission. When the time is right, Shenzhen will send its secret subliminal signals—most likely through the Tier II wireless network contracts the Chinese vendors have managed to win in the U.S.—setting loose a tide of legislation and favorable regulation that will allow Huawei and ZTE to land multi-billion-dollar contract after multi-dollar contract, as well as pave the way for the People’s Liberation Army’s march on Silicon Valley. [Ed note: Thanks to all for your good-natured patience with our obvious Hollywood-inspired paranoid fantasy here, meant more as a satire of U.S. biases than anything resembling reality…]

3) You thought Dragon Dictation was neat, but Nuance Communications saved the big guns for 2011. Forget hands-free, we’re about to experience ‘device-free’. Nuance’s new network-based speed recognition technology does away with the handset entirely, allowing your voice box to interact directly with the cell site and the Internet to link directly to your brain. Nuance held back the technology in 2010 due to some user interface issues. Apparently there was a high rate of insanity induced in its test subject from hearing disembodied voices in their heads sharing their friends’ Facebook statuses and listing off every CCed e-mail address in a corporate e-mail. Nuance believes it has found in the answer. It’s introducing fun and zany avatars, mental projections that float innocuously at your shoulder and providing a calming image to interact with. At launch, you can choose between the head of Cheshire cat with an oversized smile or Kim Kardashian.

Happy New Year, everyone.