This is a pure what-if, "it'd be cool if they did it", "hey, if I was in charge of Apple..." post.  Quick, little-known fact: I started out my college career as an industrial design student.  After a good round of soul-searching, I decided it wasn't the best fit for me and I went on in search of a new major, finally settling on multimedia design.  Though I changed gears, I've never lost my passion or interest for industrial design and still deconstruct and reconstruct objects that I'd like to see made better in one way, or another.  This constant "tinkering obsession" of mine has set it's sights on what might be the single-greatest piece of technology I've ever purchased: the iPad.

I'd imagine the task that Apple's design team have to accomplish must be, to put it lightly, quite daunting.  How do you improve on products that, in most cases, are game changers, and might be the best-in-the business?  

These aren't changes for the sake of change.  After using my iPad for countless hours, these are the small changes I'd like to see made to make this product really rock.

A quick mock-up of my iPad 2 concept.

Front-facing video

While using the iPad as a traditional camera would be an awkward experience (imagine holding up a camera the size of note pad to snap a picture), a front-facing camera on the iPad would be a great addition to not only the device, but the progression of FaceTime devices that Apple is planning to roll out.

This would also be a nice feature to fire up when you're sitting at home watching the Daytona 500 and chatting via Skype with your friend in MN.  Not that I've done that for the past 2 years...  It'd also be useful for other, less-geeky things too.

Touch-sensitive home button with orientation-specific placement and pressure-sensitive activation

I've lost track of how many times I've held the iPad in landscape orientation and tried pressing my index finger or thumb through the center of the bottom bezel, thinking the home button was there.  This might be the biggest what-if in my dream redesign list, but why not remove the mechanical home button and replace it with one that's touch-sensitive?  One bonus to the non-mechanical button would be the possibility of it relocating itself when the iPad's orientation changes.  To avoid any accidental taps, I'd make it pressure sensitive as well to avoid inadvertent contact (since we're shooting for the stars).

Thinner chassis and a flattened glass/plastic back panel.

If you look at it, the iPad is quite thin. At at half an inch thick, it feels great in your hands and it's ultra-portable.  But if you set it down on a table, you'll notice it's hard to type on (unless you're using a case).  The curved back makes for a rockin' time, but not in a good way.  My vision for the iPad 2 includes removing the curved back and giving it a flat, iPhone 4-esque back panel of either glass or plastic.  The material change would also make the iPad easier to grip.  I'd also make the chassis thinner, especially after looking at how thick the edges would be if they were drawn out to the full thickness of the device.  

Retina Display

This one is probably the most-likely to show up in the next revision of the iPad.  The crystal-clear display that is included on the iPhone 4 would look gorgeous on the iPad.  That is all.