Hasta La Gadget!

Good morning Gadget Lab readers. It’s time for today’s overzealous iPad speculation. In this episode we take a look at the “new” iPad case, which will apparently sport two dock-connectors, with a second port on the side to enable landscape docking.

The “evidence” comes from the Mission Repair blog, a somewhat suspect source as we shall see. Mission repair appears to have gotten its hands on spare parts for the next-gen iPad. The aluminum shell has a second slot on the long side.

I call bluff. Apple has indeed filed for a patent showing two ports of some kind, but duplication of function like this seems distinctly un-Apple. Take a second look at that slot, though, and you’ll see it is just the right size for an SD-card slot, something Apple already builds in to the iMac and MacBook Pro (I held my iPad up to the iMac for comparison and the size is just right).

Also, doesn’t it seem a little odd that a repair company would already have spares for an as-yet unreleased iPad? Apple has a history of making small revisions in the first year of a new product (a memory increase on the original iPhone, for example) but major revisions on mobile devices come one year apart, like clockwork.

We have seen Mission Repair’s work before. Back in February, before the iPad shipped, the company posted a picture of the internal frame of an iPad which turned out to be real. The site claimed that it had space for a front-facing camera, but this turned out to be the gap for the ambient light sensor. Sure, they got ahold of the parts before launch, but weeks, not months before.

Double dock iPad? Nah. I don’t see it. An SD card slot? Along with a FaceTime camera in a new, February/April iPad release, I’d put money on it.

[UPDATE: Engadget boss Joshua Topolsky has it from a “trusted source” that the “image actually shows is a rejected concept from the current generation iPad.”

iPad Landscape docking? You decide! [Mission Repair]

Photos: Mission Repair

See Also:

• Apple iPad May Ship With Webcam

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