Well, the cat's out of Jobs's bag. Next week's incredible unveiling? Well, it's one of the ones that some people have been waiting for longest. I'd call it a Newton II except it's come so much further.

In a nutshell, it's a PDA, significantly bigger than a Palm or small WinCE device, with a great color screen, a 'lite' version of OS X, multimedia and handwriting recognition support, Firewire, audio in and out, quite likely an Airport card.

On the software side, it looks like NewtonOS, where NewtOS would be if it had been evolving for the past 5 years instead of canned (which it may very well have been, though most of the Newton engineers I knew have gone to Palm or Handspring).

There's the notepad, of course, but there's also a full web browser, an OS rebuilt around multimedia, and quite possibly one of those snazzy 5gig Toshiba drives in there, although maybe not.

I'd post the pictures, but that would just elicit me a call from Apple legal later tonight or tomorrow morning and I'd just as soon not. If the pictures are still up at SpyMac when you read this, that's great. If not, well, as Apple keeps reminding us on their home page, Monday's just around the corner.

Damn I wonder if it still uses NewtonScript on the back end, or if it's BSD-based. If it's the former, then I'm probably the only person at Yahoo who's a readymade NewtonScript developer with four years experience. If it's the latter, well, that's just so cool I wouldn't care about it not using NewtonScript.

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Though I'm not putting up a mirror for the aforementioned reasons, you can find one for now at Interface Studio.

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Of course, it might not be real at all anyhow. Some folks over at MacSlash are raising red flags, mostly about small vibrations in the video in the closeup movie and the use of 'Apple iWalk' on the startup screen when all other apple products are refered to without the Apple moniker. Then there's the fact that Apple doesn't have a trademark on iWalk... but Microsoft does.

Okay, so there's still a little uncertainty. It'll make the world go around for another few days. Maybe the cat's still in the bag after all. :-) I'll say this: Apple's hype machine has actually made me not want to find the secret before Monday. Oh sure I'm looking, and if it's out, I wana know, but I'm kind of hoping Apple can keep it under wraps until the moment of the unveiling. Like the iMac. I didn't know, even though I worked in the office that was doing all the print work. There was just this room that was always off limits. I want a key to that room...

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For the truly anal (and those who can get movie 3 to play) try going frame-by-frame. when the person touches the disk, rotating the apple logo, watch carefully. The logo is straight down, the finger touches, starts seeming to move the wheel, but the logo stays still, until after 5 frames it instantly jumps to where it should have been, but there's no blurring, and no corresponding finger movement. Looks like a glitch in teh CGI, though why someone would want to go through that much trouble... Also, it seems doubtful that the site would post for three days saying 'we have this confidential video. We're just making sure it's real before we post it...' acting as a beacon for Apple to step in if they really had something.

If it's a fake, it's the best I've ever seen. If it's not, there's some darn strange stuff going on. Also, the trim around the edge of the monitor often obscures the edge of the screen, including menus and other interface elements. doesn't seem like something Apple would do...