As Winston Churchill might have put it, an Apple rumor can fly halfway around the world before truth has a chance to get its boots on.

Case in point: the iPhone mini-tablet story that broke Wednesday afternoon in Germany.

It started with a bad computer an English translation of a sloppy dispatch in the German language version of ZDnet. Under the headline “iPhone kommt mit größerem Display und Intel Atom,” ZDNet.de reported on a speech given by Intel Germany CEO Hannes Schwaderer in Munich. The key passage, as machine-translated, edited and re-broadcast by MacRumors:

As part of an Intel event for the 40th birthday of the semiconductor company at Munich’s BMW World, Germany managing director Hannes Schwaderer confirmed today what has long been a rumor on the Internet: namely, that there is an iPhone with Intel’s new Atom chip. The device is slightly larger than the current version, Schwaderer said. That is not, however, because of the Intel chip, but because of the larger display used in the new iPhone. (link)

MacRumors’ Arnold Kim helpfully added that this correlated with “circulating rumors” that Apple was working on a mini-tablet (720×480) device.

That’s all it took. By Thursday morning, there were 15 headlines on Techmeme echoing and amplifying the ZDNet report, among them:

• Valleywag: “Intel Atom to be used in new, larger iPhone”
• Gizmodo: “Intel Germany CEO Spills on Atom-Based Mini-Tablet iPhone”
• Engadget: “WWDC to launch a 3G iPhone and Atom-based MID device?”

AppleInsider ran a Photoshop rendition of a Newton-size iPhone and reminded readers that the device Intel Germany’s CEO now “vouches” for was first reported by AppleInsider last September. (link) Seth Weintraub in Computerworld went so far in his tablet-iPhone speculation as to post a bar graph of benchmark tests comparing the Atom to predecessor chips. (link)

The only trouble with all of this is that it’s not true, as Intel (INTC) PR took pains to point out in ZDNet’s next-day quasi-retraction.

Intel specifically “disclaimed” the report that started it all. Intel Germany’s CEO was only making general remarks about the kind of mobile devices the Atom might power in the future and did not mean to speculate about future Apple (AAPL) products. He mentioned the iPhone in this connection, according to Intel, only as an example of a small Internet device.

“Intel knows nothing over future products of other manufacturers and can therefore over it also nothing say,” press spokesman Mike Cato told ZDNet in a quote that probably sounded better in German than it does in Babel Fish translation. (link)

[UPDATE: MacRumors' Kim stands by his German-to-English translation (duly noted, and corrected above) and notes that ZDNet now points to second account of Schwaderer's speech from PCGamesHardware.de:

"PCGH-Editor Daniel Waadt was there as well an can attest, that Schwaderer referred to the iPhone as an example for the use of the atom-processor from Intel. The Intel CEO mentioned furthermore, that the display on iPhone 2 would be bigger than on iPhone 1 (although it is already quite big). iPhone 2 is also thinner than iPhone 1." (via MacRumors, translated "by Leo from Fscklog")

We leave it to the reader to determine if this confirms the existence of the mini-tablet iPhone.]

How fast will the new iPhone run on AT&T’s 3G network?

Plenty fast, according to promises made by AT&T (T) mobility chief Ralph de la Vega at Morgan Stanley’s annual Communications Conference on Wednesday.

De la Vega said that a version of the network was already running in AT&T labs at 7.2 megabits per second, which according to AppleInsider’s Katie Marsal is double the theoretical throughput of the company’s HSPA (High Speed Packet Access) network. (link)

It also happens to match the specs of the Infineon (IFX) SGOLD3 chip Apple has reportedly chosen to serve as the new iPhone’s cellular modem. See here.

Throughput of 7.2 Mbps would put the 3G iPhone within spitting distance of Wi-Fi speeds, which typically run between 6.5 Mbps and 20 Mbps.

But de la Vega didn’t stop there. According to Marsal, he told the Morgan Stanley audience that sometime in 2009 the company will transition to HSPA release 7, which could deliver speeds “exceeding 20 megabits per second.” (link)

Of course, we won’t know how fast Apple’s (AAPL) 3G iPhone really is until someone gets their hands on one and runs some good benchmark tests in the wild. AT&T EDGE network, after all, is rated at up to 236.8 kbps, but when put to the test, actual throughput turned out to be in the 50 to 90 kbps range (see here).

In February, AT&T said it expected to deliver 3G services to some 350 leading U.S. markets before the end of 2008, including all of the top 100 U.S. cities (link). Owners of 3G iPhone in the other U.S. markets will have to make do with EDGE — or whatever stray Wi-Fi signals they manage to pick up.

Less than a week after press reports that a deal had been reached, Swisscom on Wednesday confirmed that it will be bringing Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone to Switzerland this summer.

For a country known for its discretion, Switzerland has been a hotbed of iPhone rumors lately. The one getting the most buzz was posted Tuesday on MacPrime’s Swisscom iPhone forum by a reader named dakis. Dakis provides price points, a June 20 delivery date and three colors: silver, black and white — none of which sounds quite right.

Swisscom (SWJ.F) is Switzerland’s largest mobile phone carrier, with 5.1 million mobile subscribers, and one of its biggest IT providers. Wednesday’s announcement follows a string of deals that more than triples the iPhone’s available market, according to American Technology Research analyst Shaw Wu, from 150 million in the U.S. and Europe today to roughly 470 million worldwide this summer.

[Thanks to 9to5Mac for the tip.]

When Bill Gates and New York Times (NYT) publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. unveiled the Times Reader in April 2006, they demonstrated the program to the American Society of Newspaper Publishers on a tablet PC — a piece of hardware Gates was very excited about at the time.

Tablets still haven’t quite caught on, but the software — which syncs to the Times’ servers and delivers an easy-to-read, paginated version of the paper that can be browsed offline — developed a loyal following. At least among Windows users; more than two years later, there still isn’t a version that runs on the Apple (AAPL) Macintosh.

But there will be. On Tuesday, Rob Larson, VP for digital production at the Times, showed off sample pages of Times Reader for the Mac and announced that a beta version will be available later this month. See here.

Larson also stuck around to answer questions. The service will be free while it’s in beta. After that it will cost $14. 95 a month (about a quarter the price of a print subscription). If you have a home delivery subscription, you’ll get the Times Reader for free.

It’s a Cocoa application that uses Apple’s Safari and Microsoft’s (MSFT) Silverlight plugin to render the pages.

They’re there: Carrie Bradshaw. Tony Soprano. Jimmy McNulty. Jemaine Clement. Seth Bullock. Julius Caesar.

Early Tuesday morning, somebody at Apple’s iTunes Store flicked a switch and six of HBO’s most popular series became available for download for prices ranging from $1.99 to $2.99 per episode. They are:

• Sex and the City: $1.99 per episode
• The Wire: $1.99
• Deadwood: $2.99
• Flight of the Conchords: $1.99
• Rome: $2.99
• The Sopranos: $2.99

As widely reported on Monday, the deal is a breakthrough for both Apple (AAPL) and Time Warner’s (TWX) HBO.

For HBO, which is making individual episodes available for the first time, it’s a chance to expand viewership beyond its 30 million cable TV subscribers to Apple’s broader audience of 50 million registered iTunes users.

For Apple, it’s a strong signal that Steve Jobs has backed away from his stubborn insistence on flat-rate pricing — $1.99 for TV episodes, $.99 for songs — and is ready start a new round of deal making in Hollywood.

On May 1, Apple announced an agreement with Warner Brothers, 20th Century Fox (NWS), Walt Disney (DIS), Paramount (VIA), Sony (SNE) and others to make movies available for iTunes download the same day they are released on DVD at two price points: $14.99 for new releases and $9.99 for older films. (see Apple’s new Hollywood deal)

Could a rapprochement with NBC — which pulled its series off iTunes last December in a dispute over flat rate pricing (see here) — be far behind? The fact that NBC (GE) started streaming free episodes of two of its most popular shows, The Office and 30 Rock, to iPhones last week seems like a promising sign.

[UPDATE: Apple posted a press release this morning. HBO is "excited." Apple is "thrilled."]

It’s no accident that Eve, Wall-E’s sleek, pod-like love interest in the forthcoming Disney/Pixar animated feature film by the same name, looks like something out of Apple’s (AAPL) design department.

Writing in the current issue of Fortune, Richard Siklos reports that Jonathan Ive, head of Apple’s design department and the man responsible for the iMac, iPod and iPhone, had a hand in creating the robot.

In the piece, director Andrew Stanton tells Siklos:

“I wanted Eve to be high-end technology — no expense spared — and I wanted it to be seamless and for the technology to be sort of hidden and subcutaneous. The more I started describing it, the more I realized I was pretty much describing the Apple playbook for design.” (link)

According to Siklos, a call from Stanton to Steve Jobs in 2005 resulted in Ive spending a day at Pixar consulting on the Eve prototype. Siklos writes:

“Stanton said that it was a ‘lovefest’ with Ive, but that the notoriously tight-lipped design wizard offered few specific modifications. ‘Apple is so proprietary and so secretive that he couldn’t even really allude to where the future of technology was going,’ says Stanton. ‘The most he could do is nod his head to the things we said we wanted to do.’ (Through a spokesman, Ive declined to comment.)” (link)

Disney (DIS) bought Pixar in 2006 in a deal that made Jobs Disney’s largest individual shareholder.

Stanton, who directed Finding Nemo, says he’s been kicking around the idea for Wall-E for years, even before Toy Story was made. He has summarized it most succinctly like this: “What if mankind evacuated Earth and forgot to turn off the last remaining robot?”

The movie opens June 27, which is the day the smart money is betting that the 3G iPhone goes on sale.

You can read Siklos’ piece at Fortune.com here.

The week opens with fresh reports of iPhone agreements with overseas carriers, as Apple (AAPL) continues its push to roll the Web-browsing cellphone out beyond the United States and Europe.

The Wall St. Journal, BBC and other sources reported on Monday that Apple and SingTel have signed deals to bring the iPhone to four countries in the Asia-Pacific region. SingTel, with 124 million mobile subscribers, is said to be the largest Asian provider outside the People’s Republic of China. The deals involve SingTel and three of its subsidiaries:

• SingTel will bring the iPhone to its 2.3 million subscribers in Singapore
• Bharti Airtel will offer it to its 64 million customers in India
• Globe Telecom will offer it to 21 million subscribers in the Philippines
• Optus will offer it to its 7 million customers in Australia.

Australia and India were among the countries that Vodaphone (VOD) said last week that it was covering (see here) — further evidence that Apple is signing contracts that don’t offer exclusivity.

Below: an update of CdnPhoto’s map of the iPhone world, redrawn to include the latest developments.

[UPDATE: Apple made it official on Tuesday with this press release. Jobs' keynote is scheduled for 10 a.m. PT.]

Although no official announcement has been made, Apple public relations confirmed to Fortune that Steve Jobs will deliver a keynote address on June 9, the first day of the 2008 World Wide Developers conference.

It is widely expected that Jobs will use that speech to unveil the next generation of iPhones, including a so-called 3G model.

“The launch of the new model is imminent,” wrote Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster in a report to clients Monday.

Munster notes that beginning Saturday, May 10, first generation iPhones were unavailable through Apple’s online store in the United States, the most recent sign that the company is clearing inventory in advance of a new release. (Two days earlier, O2 ran out of iPhones in the United Kingdom.) On Sunday Munster called 11 Apple retail stores to check on their supply; five were completely out of stock and one of the remaining six had fewer that five phones on hand.

Munster also alerted his clients to the discovery, first reported over the weekend by MacRumors, of a switch in the latest release of the iPhone 2.0 firmware that will allow users to toggle 3G data ON for faster download speeds or OFF to conserve battery life.

Despite dwindling supplies, Munster still estimates that Apple will ship 1.7 million iPhones in the quarter that ends June 30. That’s because he expects Apple to start shipping the new model in large numbers before the end of the month.

Other signs — including the release of the new Software Developers Kit scheduled for late June and an AT&T Mobile (T) memo canceling staff vacations between June 15 and July 12 (see here) — point to Friday, June 27, as the day the new model will go on sale. That would give Apple four days of 3G iPhone sales before the quarter closes.

“Net-net,” writes Munster, “the initial surge of iPhone sales in June would likely offset the lost sales due to limited availability in May.”

The drumroll has already started on Apple’s (AAPL) website, where users can download a Dashboard widget counting down the hours before the June 9 WWDC by the days, hours, minutes and seconds.

Here’s one thing the folks at Apple could teach their friends at AT&T: how to parcel out the good news.

Case in point: the Starbucks-iPhone-Wi-Fi deal that’s been on and off all week and generating all the wrong kind of headlines (see for example, here).

If Steve Jobs were running AT&T, he would have kept it simple. And a surprise. The first we would have heard about it would be when he announced it, with a flourish, as a fait accompli. Starting today, free unlimited Wi-Fi for every iPhone owner at all 7,000 Starbucks coffee shops and every other AT&T Wi-Fi hotspot — 17,000 in the U.S., 70,000 around the world.

Boom.

What we got instead was the public relations equivalent of second-day coffee, starting with the press release AT&T (T) issued back in February. The 13-paragraph document talks about free Wi-Fi for “AT&T broadband, AT&T U-verse^SM Internet [and] AT&T’s remote access services business customers” but never mentions Apple (AAPL) or the iPhone — two hot-button words that would have given the news some real buzz.

Instead reporters focused on the fact that Starbucks (SBUX) was pulling the plug on T-Mobile, which had been providing it with wireless service since 2001.

Then, last week, without warning, AT&T turned the service on. I spotted it on April 30 when I tried to log on to my T-Mobile account and discovered an AT&T link that wasn’t there the day before. I was already thinking about how many extra shots of espresso I could buy with the $39 a month I would save.

And I was not alone. Apple rumor sites that day were flooded with tips from both coasts alerting them that iPhone owners were getting free Wi-Fi at Starbucks by just by typing in their 10-digit AT&T phone number. AT&T had apparently launched a nationwide test without telling anyone.

Then, four days later, the service stopped, as abruptly and mysteriously as it started, setting off waves of confusion and speculation about what the company’s on-again, off-again behavior might mean. (see here)

You might think that AT&T would have learned their lesson. But no. On Thursday, the text on its website was changed to add language about the new service — “access to AT&T’s more than 17,000 Wi-Fi hotspots, including Starbucks* all for use (sic) in the U.S.” — that iPhone owners took as a signal that the game was on for good.

Then the language disappeared, along with the Wi-Fi service, triggering another round of second-guessing. (see here)

Apparently the habit of firing before aiming — not to mention clearing it with publicity — had spread from AT&T’s networking guys to its marketing staff.

Officially, both AT&T and Apple have no comment, but the folks in Cupertino are clearly miffed. They saw the Starbucks deal as big news for iPhone owners, and they had hoped to work with AT&T to package it for high-profile release, probably in a matter of weeks.

They would have done it right.

Are Apple’s lawyers getting ready to go on vacation? For the second time in as many days, the company has agreed to settle a lingering class action suit.

On Thursday, it was a pair of complaints out of Canada that 1st, 2nd and 3rd generation iPods were delivering something like three hours of music, not eight hours as advertised. Although one case was granted class action status and the other wasn’t, Apple (AAPL) agreed to settle both, according to the Montreal Gazette, offering $44 store credit to any Canadian who purchased one of the affected iPods before June 24, 2004. As many as 80,000 could be eligible. Hearings are set for May 26 in Montreal and June 20 in Toronto.

Then on Friday, according to the LA Times, Apple agreed to pay some 2.3 million Mac owners refunds of $25 to $79 to resolve claims that some of its power supplies were prone to fray and spark and self-destruct. Customers who bought replacement adaptors for PowerBooks and iBooks could be eligible for the refunds, according to documents filed in federal court in San Jose. A final court hearing is scheduled for Sept. 8.

Still pending, notes the Gazette, is the case filed against Apple Canada last fall by law student David Bitton who was surprised to discover that his 8GB iPod Nano held only 7.45GB. According to his lawyer, Bitton is asking for the full $220 purchase price, but will settle for 7.5%, plus court costs.