iPod Cameras To 'Charlies,' Apple Rumor Mill Chugging

The rumor mill's in overdrive, folks, from iPhone cameras to the mysterious "Project Charlie." And if there's any company that knows how to drum up free advertising, thanks to speculation of what it's going to do next, it's Apple.

Let's review the latest. Earlier Friday, cell-phone news site PhoneArena.com posted a few screen shots of what appears to be an inventory sheet for Best Buy. The shot shows three AT&T phones each with "Project Charlie" in the description and, according to anonymous sources referenced by PhoneArena, each 'Charlie' could represent a new version of the iPhone.

Another hot rumor comes from HardMac, the English-language translation of French Apple news site MacBidouille, which said sources leaked information to it that future iPhones will have "exactly the same shape and size [of] the current iPhone 3G, despite fakes and rumors circulating," and both iPod Nano and iPod Touch will include cameras as part of a fall refresh of the devices.

The PhoneArena and HardMac rumors come right on the heels of a rumor from those posted earlier this week by a Chinese Apple Web site and picked up all around the blogosphere. A source, cited by the Chinese Web forum, Weiphone, claims that a new iPhone will see storage upgraded to 32 GB, have a 600-MHz CPU speed (200 more Megahertz than current iPhones), and a jump to 256 MB of RAM. The Weiphone rumor also claims that the iPhone will get a 3.2-megapixel camera equipped with autofocus.

Of course, our favorite rumor remains one that isn't about an iPhone (we think). According to some sources, Apple has a multipurpose tablet device in the works that can do it all, including to allow users to surf the Web and read e-books, making it a viable challenger to Amazon's Kindle and Kindle DX devices. Given how cozy Amazon and Apple seem to be, however , with the Kindle for iPhone App, Amazon may not be all that worried.

All the speculation has to be a nice distraction for Apple as its App Store's status as an alleged cash cow gets called into question. A recent examination by Lightspeed Venture Partners analyst Jeremy Liew suggested Apple's earned between $20 million and $45 million from the App Store so far -- hardly the $1 billion number most observers expected it to hit soon -- and with relative ease.