>I also fully agree with Gruber on a rear-facing camera making very little sense on a device that large.
A rear-facing camera makes little sense if you imagine the use is for people to walk around taking pictures like they would with a phone. However, when you start imagining uses like Augmented Reality or other situations where you're interacting with real world artifacts, then it makes a little more sense.
> It took 2 months to get the previous iPad from the US to the first round of international markets and another 3-4 months to do the full round.
It took about 5 months for the initial iPhone to get out of the US. By the 3G's release, iPhone was in 6 countries (USA, France, Germany, UK, Ireland and Austria).
The iPhone 3G was released simultaneously in 22 countries (though the 3GS backed out a bit, release day for only 8 countries and the rest staggered over 2 months)
I think you make a very good point. The iPhone 4 was released in June, but in Europe we didn't see any real availability for many months afterwards, even into October. If Apple had released an iPhone 4GS in September, it would have delayed many peoples plans to buy an iPhone, I would think.
1. Releasing the iPad in September makes no sense simply because it was such a massive hit in the holiday season. Generally speaking, you want to spread out your demand as much as possible. It took 2 months to get the previous iPad from the US to the first round of international markets and another 3-4 months to do the full round. You can only produce so many. Actually not being able to buy one because demand is so high is not Apple's style;
2. I don't see Apple releasing a new version 6 months after the previous, particularly when, in all likelihood, the iPad 2 won't have been in some markets for more than a month or two.
As far as conflicting reports on parts and specs, that's nothing new. Just like there were reports of a CDMA iPhone YEARS before there was one. There are two reasons for this:
1. Apple produces far more prototypes than they release (eg the CDMA iPhone was tested for about a year before release); and
2. People just make stuff up for page views.
I also fully agree with Gruber on a rear-facing camera making very little sense on a device that large.