If your attention span is somehow even shorter than ours, pat yourself on the back-- that's a pretty noteworthy accomplishment. Hey! You! Over here... Hello, remember us? Okay, now focus. We were saying that if your attention span is even shorter than ours, then you got bored with all the P1 rumors quite a while ago, moved on to the Apple-Palm thing, got tired of that, and are now ready for the next set of product rumors to entertain and amuse. Which means that you've probably moved onto this whole Apple-Swatch team-up, especially since Swatches tend to be bright and attention-grabbing, so maybe you'll be able to keep your eyes (and your mind) on the issue for more than thirty seconds.

Still with us? Here's the deal: a Swiss Mac site is reporting that Apple has indeed partnered with Swatch, as many of us would have assumed based on the vast suffusion of warm, happy feelings emanating from Apple's site about Swatch's Internet time gimmick, the Swatch Beat. Remember, Apple's site turned into a Palm love-fest not too long ago, right about when the reports of the Apple-Palm partnership started to flouri... Hey, where are you going? Okay, okay, no digressions. Swatch! Bright colors! Crazy patterns! Are you still here?

So the rumor is that Apple is working with Swatch on making a watch-and-mousepad combo that makes it easier to check your email on other people's computers. From what we can determine, the idea is that the watch stores your mail server info, login name, password, etc. and can relay that information to any computer equipped with the special mouse pad. You wave your wrist near the mouse pad, it grabs the info, and tells the computers to initiate a connection and download your email. The watch does not actually check email itself, or store it, or let you take it with you-- at least, that's what we infer from the brief report. Think of it as sort of like a Mobil Speedpass for email. Just as the Speedpass lets you buy gas at any Mobil station just by swiping your keychain across the sensor, the Apple Swatch will let you check your email at computers with the special mousepad without requiring you to enter your server name and all that stuff. Kind of neat, but since it doesn't let the user carry email messages away on his/her wrist, is it cool enough to keep the attention of the truly flighty? Hello?... Hmmm, apparently not...