iSlate or iGuide? Tablet or ebook reader? Apple has many guessing.

Well, it's almost the new year, and that means it's almost time for the latest round of Apple rumors to see their shadow or lumber back into hibernation until June.

Will the world finally get an Apple tablet, the long-predicted, heavily vaunted answer to a million fanboys' prayers? "iTablet" buzz has already sent Apple's stock price to an all-time high, but let's take a look at what's "known" and see if we can find any facts.

Event

Apple has rented space at San Francisco's Yerba Buena Center for the Arts for a special event in late January, according to a Financial Times report. Similar events have been used to show off the latest updates to Apple products, including this year's iPod Nano refresh that added a tiny video camera to the svelte music player. The original iPhone was previewed at a Macworld keynote speech by CEO Steve Jobs in January 2007, six months before it became available, probably because the company wanted to formally introduce it itself, before its existence was made public in FCC tests. Could the block of time Apple's reserved at Yerba Buena in January be for a similar preview gathering?

Hardware

Apple has reportedly placed orders for a whole bunch of 10-inch displays, according to Taiwanese tech rumor site Digitimes. And AppleInsider reports that a similar order for corresponding tablet PC display connectors was placed with another manufacturer. No current Apple product uses a display of that size, so signs point to a new product – but what kind exactly remains unclear. In an October meeting with staffers, (a video of which got leaked to the Web) New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller casually mentioned an "impending Apple slate." But was that insider information or just forward-looking speculation by an industry leader who wants to stay on top? Flying in the face of popularly accepted hypotheses, tech news site QuickPWN insists the iSlate, or whatever it's going to be called, is going to be a Kindle-slaying ebook reader, and not a tablet PC, citing anonymous sources.

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