Developers and pundits are crawling all over the iPad SDK that Apple released to developers yesterday, and have found a few noteworthy items. While it was known that the upcoming 3.2 update to the iPhone OS will be iPad-only, what a closer look at the SDK revealed is that particular features shown in the iPad demo yesterday will not be supported by the iPhone or iPod, creating the possibility of separate app development processes for the two families of iPhone OS devices. Also a feature of the iPad emulator shows a "Take Picture" option, which has led to speculation that a camera may be included in a future model of the device.

News that the iPad would run the iPhone OS was received with pleasure by many iPhone users who anticipated that some of the interface enhancements of the new device would make their way to its older sibling. A reading of the updated human interface guidelines for iPhone 3.2, though, indicates that two of the most interesting ones - split view (with separate sections of the screen showing different data) and popovers (floating fully-formatted menus) - are both listed as "iPad-only." While it's entirely understandable, since these features are really large-screen specific, this will lead to a "fork" for many developers who will now need to maintain separate iPad and iPhone/iPod versions of their apps.

Also today, Greg Kumparak at CrunchGear was playing with the Contacts app on the iPad simulator bundled in the SDK, and noticed something that seemed a bit odd.

It's entirely possible that this was an oversight on Apple's part, forgetting to take out a feature from the pre-3.2 SDK. However, it leaves open the possibility that Apple will support a built-in camera at some point in its roadmap for the product. Given that the absence of a camera was one of the sources of disappointment among many fans yesterday, it's likely something that Apple is at least considering as a future option.

image via CrunchGear