Just Picture It: An Apple iPod Touch With A Camera

Is Apple's iPod Touch getting a camera? Or more specifically, an iPod Touch camera with video capability, too? Well, there's no news and all rumors at this point, as is often the case with anything Apple-related. But you didn't think the coming and going of Apple's World Wide Developers Conference meant a slowdown of the endlessly chugging Apple rumor mill, did you?

Apple hasn't said whether it's going to include a camera or do anything else with future versions of the iPod Touch or iPod Nano, but that hasn't stopped the blogosphere from boiling over with rumors that Apple plans to do exactly that: add a camera with video capabilities -- similar in style and functionality to the one on its iPhone 3G S -- to at least the iPod Touch, and maybe both the Touch and the iPod Nano.

And why wouldn't that be a logical move? Every handheld device worth its casing, whether it's a phone or not, seems to have some kind of image capture capability these days. If Apple wants to standardize certain features across its entire i-platform, why not a camera on all iPods and i-devices, not just the iPhone?

There's a larger prize at stake, too: Apple's continued ability to lay claim to the "all-in-one" handheld device crown. Amazon, though dominant with its Kindle e-reader, saw the writing on the wall with the iPhone's e-reading functionality and promptly served up a Kindle application for the iPhone. Maybe Cisco's Pure Digital, the maker of the Flip video camera, should be a bit more concerned that iPods of the future can do all that the Flip can do -- or rather, that the Flip can do a fraction of what the iPod can do.

Flimsy as it is, the evidence for a camera on the iPod has been mounting. The initial round of blogger speculation came back in May, when HardMac reported that Apple was planning to refresh the iPod Touch and iPod Nano in September and outfit each with a camera.

In the following weeks came lots and lots of chatter about case designs for the iPod Touch and iPod Nano that had cut-outs for camera lenses. MacRumors took the liberty of rounding up some of the images of those casing designs -- of good to questionable quality -- from sources such as Uxsight and DealExtreme.

Both of those sites have done plenty of unfounded Apple rumor mongering in the past but have also been accurate about certain iPhone specifications before they were officially confirmed. In the Apple rumor mill, almost anything goes, it seems.

More speculation on iPod Nano and iPod Touch cameras has come by way of TechCrunch, which reported through a source in Asia that Apple put in a sizable order for $10 cameras much like the ones currently seen in iPhone 3G S.

TechCrunch's source claims that the camera order was big enough on Apple's part to suggest that camera functionality might be headed not just to iPod Nano and iPod Touch but to more members of the iPod device family as well. Again, it's all still rumor at this point -- and more than a little conjecture -- but what about a camera for the iPod wouldn't make sense?

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