Ah, Valentine's Day-- that glorious celebration of love inspired by the historic occasion of St. Hallmark driving all shame out of the greeting card business in the early 1400s. Well, AtAT may not by a virtual luv-fest like some sites we could mention (heartfelt congratulations to CmdrTaco and Kathleen Fent on their Very SlashDot Proposal and subsequent engagement; we're certain their geek love will flourish gloriously), but in the spirit of the day, we thought we'd dish out something extra-special for those of you feeling a little lonely without the PDA of your dreams by your side. So willingly suspend that disbelief and brace yourselves for three big rumorological smooches of Apple handheldy goodness. Thy cup runneth over!

Smooch number one: we've been hanging onto this one for a whole week, just waiting for the right occasion. By now you've probably seen it, but just in case you haven't, faithful viewer ~brian tipped us off to a batch of Apple-branded PDA evidence that we can only describe as tenuous, at best; according to Insanely Great Mac, a French Mac site (MacGeneration) recently linked to a translation of a Taiwanese article allegedly all about how Inventec Appliances has "possibly" been contracted by Apple to crank out "iPads." Yessiree, folks, according to this unattributed Taiwanese article translated into English and uncovered via France, the iPad is no less than the iPod 2, doubling its storage capacity to 10 GB and merging in Palm OS-based PDA functions alongside its existing MP3-playing capabilities. The credulous will be glad to hear that it's slated to appear "at the end of the first quarter or at the beginning of the second quarter."

Smooch number two: faithful viewer Xapplimatic gives the iPad believers still more to cling to, by pointing out an article at Brighthand which mentions that at last week's PalmSource Conference and Expo, the author "heard whispers that Apple has licensed the Palm platform and had developed a cool FireWire device to round out its new consumer device strategy." What's nifty is that this rumor meshes perfectly with the iPad rumor above; a consumer-targeted, FireWire-equipped PDA could very well be a next-generation iPod as described previously. Of course, there's no guarantee whatsoever that the source of those rumors at PalmSource wasn't the very same mysterious Taiwanese newspaper article mentioned above, but heck, it's Valentine's Day-- such suspicions are better left to less impulsive occasions.

Smooch number three: faithful viewer soupruls tells us that a Newton mailing list is all abuzz with talk of an imminent "Newton 3." Apparently some individuals have convinced themselves that while Apple nuked the Newton platform in the third week of February in 1998, the company plans to "reinvent it" in the third week of February this year. (That's next week, for those too overcome with love to check a calendar.) We're not entirely clear whether some sort of causality is supposed to be involved with the dates, but heck-- it's a day of limitless possibilities. Give yourself over to your PDA desires, because tomorrow it's back to the rational world. Maybe.