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It seems Apple has a lot more in store for the Camera app in iOS 5 than it has shown so far. An accidental discovery revealed an as-yet-unauthorized feature coded deep into the app. This is nothing less than taking panoramic pictures.

The reason why this feature is not enabled yet is pretty clear - the engineers couldn't finish it in time, so it will probably remain the subject of one of the larger future updates. After starting the function, the application prompts the user to take a series of several photos, from which a more complex algorithm is then combined into one wide-angle image.

Creating panoramas is nothing new on iOS, there are some great apps in the App Store for this purpose, but soon panoramas will be standard on iPhones. That function can be activated in two ways at the moment: one of them is a jailbreak, the other way is through the developer tools. This is a fairly simple hack, but it's not worth much at this point. The feature is still imperfect and transitions between individual photos are not smooth.

Panorama can be run on iPhone 4, iPhone 4S and iPad 2. The feature will be available from the menu Elections, where you currently turn on HDR or activate the grid. So we have to wait probably for iOS 5.1, where Panorama could appear. For now, we have to make do with apps like these Autostitch or Pano.

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