I Hear Ford's Bringing Back the Edsel, Too.

Well this ought to give all those Newton fans who demonstrated in the parking lot of Apple’s Cupertino campus the day the company killed the device in February 1998 a bit of satisfaction. “Well respected sources” (whatever that means) tell Apple Insider that Apple is hard at work on a modern-day Newton project.

“Like iPhone and the iPod Touch, the new device runs an embedded version of Apple’s Mac OS X Leopard operating system,” Apple Insider reports. “Externally, the multi-touch PDA has been described by sources as an ultra-thin ‘slate’ akin to the iPhone, about 1.5 times the size and sporting an approximate 720×480 high-resolution display that comprises almost the entire surface of the unit. The device is further believed to leverage multi-touch concepts which have yet to gain widespread adoption in Apple’s existing multi-touch products–the iPhone and iPod touch–like drag-and-drop and copy-and-paste.”

Sounds like a slick device–assuming it’s not vaporware. But really, you think Apple has time for such distractions when it’s doing all that it can to get the Tablet Mac ready for Macworld?