Edible Apple

Days after 9to5Mac discovered icons and code in the iPhone 3.2 SDK that strongly hint at support for video chat and conferencing capabilities comes even more evidence from the third beta of the SDK courtesy of MacRumors.

We’ve been told that if you go digging into Apple’s private framework which controls the camera, the iPad SDK tests for 3 additional camera characteristics that are not found in the iPhone 3.x SDK. For comparison, Erica Sadun has a code listing of iPhone 3.x PLCameraController.hon her site. The Beta 3 iPad SDK version adds these additional test conditions for the device’s capabilities.

It seems Apple built in API support to test to see if your iPad had a Front Facing Camera, Zoom and a Camera Flash. The front facing camera would, of course, be used for video chat, while Zoom and Camera Flash are often requested features for the iPhone’s camera.

It remains unclear if Apple was planning on implementing video functionality into the first version of the iPad (and perhaps ran into technical difficulties a’la the iPod Touch) or if they’re simply laying the groundwork for the second iteration of the device.

Also noteworthy are the following icons, clearly intended for the iPad, which were found in the recently released beta of the iPhone 3.2 SDK.