A new job posting on Apple's site suggests that the company is preparing to add still and video camera capabilities to its iPad tablet device in the future. The position is for a quality assurance engineer in the Media Systems division of Apple's broader Interactive Media Group and is specifically focused on the "iPad Media" segment of the division.
The Media Systems team is looking for a software quality engineer with a strong technical background to test still, video and audio capture and playback frameworks. Build on your QA experience and knowledge of digital camera technology (still and video) to develop and maintain testing frameworks for both capture and playback pipelines.
According to the job description, the employee will be responsible for assisting the development team by testing performance of their systems and developing appropriate tools for performing the testing.
Familiarity with and interest in photography, video as well as media file formats is highly desirable. Experience with tuning of and image pipeline, including, but not limited to AWB, Color Correction, AutoExposure, FrameRate adjustments is a plus.
The lack of a camera has been seen by many observers as a significant disappointment for the iPad. It does appear, however, that the iPad's enclosure contains an empty space appropriate for a notebook-style iSight camera, and the resulting speculation has included thoughts that Apple had either planned to offer a camera in the iPad but pulled it for unknown reasons or is still planning to offer one in the shipping version but did not include discussion of it during the device's introduction for similarly unknown reasons.
