Apple must be thinking the same thing. Over at their official site, Apple has posted an employment opportunity for a performance QA engineer to work on still and video capture in the Free iPad Media department.
The posting reads in full: “The Media Systems team is looking for a software quality engineer with a strong technical background to test still, video and audio capture and playback frameworks. Build on your QA experience and knowledge of digital camera technology (still and video) to develop and maintain testing frameworks for both capture and playback pipelines…Experience with tuning of and image pipeline, including, but not limited to AWB, Color Correction, AutoExposure, FrameRate adjustments is a plus.”
My big question is not if the Free iPad will get a camera, but when. Will Apple update the Free iPad along with the iPhone and iPod Touch, at least to plug a camera in there? If they dot, this could be a very abbreviated first generation for Apple’s new tablet.