Fear not, true believers; there are still more rumor scraps to sustain those of you who, like us, still keep a candle lit in the window for an Apple-branded Palm device. Recently the naysayers have been had their own rumorlicious ammo-- namely, the still-under-wraps Palm IIIc, Palm's first foray into the world of color PDAs. The IIIc's existence has been a public secret for months now, and a February introduction is still expected; in fact, the device has reportedly already materialized in the byzantine inventory systems of CompUSA. Many have taken that to mean that the mysterious color device to be unveiled at Palm's imminent Palm Color Device Developer Connection is none other than the IIIc itself, despite Palm's own maddeningly ambiguous claim that it's the baby of "one of the hardware manufacturers that makes products based on the Palm OS." Yeah, Palm is indeed one of those manufacturers, but the phraseology is darned wacky if that's really what they meant.

So, just for the sake of screwball speculation, let's take Palm's statement at face value and assume for the moment that the color Palm OS device making its debut at this developer shindig is not the IIIc. Then what? A new Visor? Not likely, given how Handspring spends all its time doing backflips trying to fulfill demand for the current model. Sony, or one of the other known Palm OS licensees? More plausible, to be sure-- especially since Palm only finally broke down and added color support to the Palm OS because of Sony's insistence, but where's the drama in that? Nope, our money's still on the dark horse: Apple. These Apple-Palm rumors have been too numerous to ignore, and that little comment Steve Jobs made about Palm during his keynote ("We've been doing a lot of work with these guys lately" or words to that effect) only strengthens our suspicions.

And here's where the pipe-dream-sustaining rumor comes in: a rumor-monger of no lesser stature than Mac the Knife himself (well, okay, it's actually his intern Brett) has the goods. He claims that sources from all sides are proclaiming this week's Apple's Demo Days to be the "possible" launch date for an Apple-branded Palm OS unit-- the very first of its ilk to support color. Okay, sure, the Knife's been wrong before, but despite his predilection for drug-induced obscurity, he's had more than his share of accurate predictions. Plus, with his impressive pharmaceutical history, we bet he knows a thing or two about seeing colors. Inside info or drug-addled hallucination? We'll know in a week or two.