New Apple iPad (iPad 2) Cameras to be Made by OmniVision?

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I don’t know whether a CDMA iPhone 4 will be announced by Verizon early next year, but a second-generation iPad is surely coming at some point in January. The next-gen iPad, the iPad 2, will probably be announced at some point in early 2011 and it will be available later in stores.

Today we’re not going to confirm that the iPad 2 exist, but to talk about the manufacturer of the next-gen iPad’s camera, which appears to be OmniVision. The company will be in charge of not one but two cameras for the iPad, a front-facing one and a back camera.

That certainly is in line with what we’ve heard before, not to mention that, considering how Apple brought FaceTime to its lines of desktops and laptops, it would be strange to see the iPad 2 come out without FaceTime support and therefore two cameras.

Let’s not also forget that while everyone else is coming out with a first-gen tablet, the Samsung Galaxy Tab, the HP Slate 500, the BlackBerry PlayBook and other tablets that are coming out in stores by the end of the year and in early 2011, Apple is going to have a second-generation tablet out, or at least announced. Said device will have to trump the competition and set new standards for the 2011-generation of tablets and it won’t be able to do that without dual camera support.

OmniVision is the CMOS image sensor creator for the iPhone 4 too so it only makes sense to see it come up with similar iPad solutions. The iPad 2 back camera is said to be a 5-megapixel camera, while the front-facing camera will offer VGA quality. Taking pictures and recording video with any tablet seems just a little bit to wild for my taste, but in order for FaceTime to work properly you’d need two cameras on mobile devices like the iPhone, iPod touch and the iPad.