As for rumors that look well past next month's Macworld Expo, do you remember yesterday's whispers about Apple allegedly working on "a product that will allow users to videoconference with friends wirelessly from the palm of their hand"? Sounds kinda far-fetched, right? After all, such a product would be doomed to failure unless it worked pretty much anywhere you take it, so it couldn't rely on WiFi hotspots or anything like that; it'd have to build off of cellular technology or something in order to have the sort of coverage necessary for people ever to want to lay out several hundred clams for what amounts to a video cell phone.

And while "3G" wireless technology made a lot of promises, personal experience and the anecdotes of others strongly imply that it was really padding its résumé something fierce. Our experience with the stuff is limited to two services, but based on what we've seen, we can offer the following observation in good conscience: out here in the Boston area, at least, Sprint PCS Vision feels like dialup, and a GPRS connection from T-Mobile feels like slightly crappy dialup. That's not to say they aren't good services; personally, we think surfing the 'net at dialup-class speeds from anywhere you can make a mobile phone call is at least eight kinds of nifty. But it doesn't sound terribly ideal for portable videoconferencing-- at least, not at a quality that Apple would actually want to ship.

But what's this? The PowerPage claims that "Apple will release a wireless laptop card/solution that will run on AT&T's high-speed EDGE Network." According to AT&T, the company "more than tripled the speed of its GPRS wireless data network" and EDGE is the result, providing "burst speeds up to 200 Kbps and average speeds of 100-130 Kbps." Generally speaking you can always ignore "burst" numbers as pipe dreams written by a marketing drone with a sick sense of humor, but an average speed of 100-130 kilobits per second isn't half bad; if it's true, than EDGE is two or three times as fast as a typical dialup modem connection-- not jaw-droppingly terrific, but a step in the right direction.

The PowerPage specifically mentions a "laptop" solution instead of any sort of handheld iChat device, so if it's real, this is probably going to be marketed as an offshoot of AirPort-- "AirPort Everywhere," as opposed to AirPort Extreme, or something like that. But the handheld video thingy is rumored to be a couple of years away, and there's nothing all that far-fetched about Apple building an iPod-type device that packs a battery, a tiny color screen, a mobile-phone-style camera, and an EDGE-compatible wireless card.

Heck, Apple could build something like that tomorrow, and now that we think about it, the company could probably even make it work with non-EDGE data services. The only reason that iChat AV demands a broadband connection for videoconferencing is because the application has such high standards for video quality-- but the current iPod has a screen resolution of only 160x128; existing cellular data services could carry two-way video that small, even in color and at a reasonable frame rate.

Aaaaand this is the point where we suddenly realize that we're taking a couple of completely unsubstantiated rumors way, way too seriously. Hey, an anonymous guy with really poor spelling just emailed us claiming to be a "vise presedent" at Apple and informed us that the company plans to ship a programmable robotic rhino next week, and it can fly and speak in Klingon-- so expect detailed analysis of weight-versus-thrust ratios and linguistic AI strategies when you tune in tomorrow. Apparently this is what we do now. Who knew?