Like a Verizon iPhone, rumors of a mini-iPad too have been doing the rounds for a long time now. With the launch of smaller tablets like Galaxy Tab and Dell Streak, chances of a smaller 7″ iPad launching over the next few months seems increasingly likely.
Now, there are rumors that the new smaller iPad is indeed launching soon and could hit the stores as early as the first quarter of 2011. What’s more, the sources also say that the smaller iPad could come equipped with the highly touted retina display of the recently launched iPhone 4. Additionally, these 7″ iPads are believed to have storage capacities of up to 128GB besides offering a mini-USB port.
While the presence of a mini-USB is pretty likely considering that recent EU regulations mandate the use of such a port for mobile device charging, it is not clear if Apple would actually bring about a 128GB device. While that is not something out of the ordinary, Apple may have rather been expected to have brough such capacity levels to the iPod Touch when it was launched recently. Also, with talks of a cloud-based iTunes being launched, a 128GB device that will subsequently rise product cost seems rather redundant. Don’t you think so?