One of the great mysteries of Apple’s design engineers is their fetish for omitting critical data sharing infrastructure from their beautiful mind babies creations. Take the Macbook Air, for example. It’s so slim, it’s so sleek. The battery life is a modern miracle. It looks beautiful. But there’s no Blu-Ray/DVD/CD drive. What?

The same could be expressed for the first generations of iPad. Equiped with a wonderfully tactile touch screen, brilliant clarity, and the same aesthetic simplicity that Apple has made it’s own, the iPad lacks a USB port.

Sure, you could argue that data sharing can still take place over WiFi networks and bluetooth, but then you’d be American. Apple rather painfully restricts bluetooth pairing to Apple-to-Apple products. And we still pay through our nostrils for data in this country, and I don’t want to be sending every one of my leisure https://improvehearingnaturally.com computing files via FTP (file transfer protocol), just because Apple says it’s a cleaner way of doing things.

So, with all of that out of the way, reports are beginning to leak (in a piece-meal, unverified fashion) that the second generation of iPad will come in three different versions, and at least one of those versions will have a USB port, if not all.

This is the part when you join me with a “Hallelujah”.

Other treats expected to surface in the iPad2 will be a smudge-proof screen (don’t pretend like that wasn’t annoying you), and support for a wider range of 3G technologies, meaning more mobile carriers will stock the iPad.

Rumour-milling seems to be the new direction Apple has taken on the marketing front, so expect leaks on an almost weekly basis leading up to the projected launch date of March/April 2011.