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Verizon have been all over CES this week, touting the speed of their 4G network and showing off the shiny new handsets that will be taking advantage of it. So it raised a couple of eyebrows when invitations started arriving in tech journalist’s inboxes announcing a press event in New York on Tuesday.

Surely it has to be something big, if they’re announcing it separately from the CES melee? A number of factors have contributed to this now seemingly credible rumour.

Firstly, last week a YouTube video appeared showing new iPhone 4 parts subtly different from the existing model – for example lacking the small grooves that have caused so much grief for those people with clammy hands. Just as the video was starting to get some traffic, if disappeared, replaced with a message “This video has been removed due to a copyright claim by Apple Inc.”. Hmm.

Earlier in the week reports started to come in that Apple employees were being denied holiday requests for the first week in February – the expected launch window for the mystical device. Hmm.

Next, the Wall Street Journal, a publication with a fairly solid track record on Apple rumours, published a story claiming the Tuesday event is the Verizon iPhone launch. Hmm.

The only unknown factor at this point is whether or not the Verizon iPhone with utilise the network’s new LTE network. There are strong arguments for and against this happened. The 4G naysayers are pointing to Apple’s historical reluctance to embrace emerging (or even established) technologies – think the first-generation iPhone’s lack of 3G, or Apple’s continued refusal to offer Blu-ray optical drives.

Meanwhile that hopeful bunch predicting a 4G iPhone are pointing towards the leaked parts (mentioned above) sporting a SIM card slot – 3G Verizon does not require a SIM card, whereas the new LTE does.

It would seem once again Apple have swooped in to take a huge amount of buzz away from CES – at the time of writing Google News returns 6,583 stories from the past 24 hours. Only one thing is for sure at this point, if a Verizon iPhone isn’t announced on Tuesday it will be the greatest trick Jobs has ever pulled.