Secret iOS 5 Easter Egg Lets You Take Panorama Photos [How-To]

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Screen Shot 2011-11-08 at 9.10.14 AM

There’s an easter egg in iOS 5: a new panorama mode that lets you stitch together multiple shots you take with your iPhone’s camera into a gorgeous 180+ degree image. Unfortunately, while Apple clearly spent some time putting this together, there’s no way to access it as a consumer unless you jailbreak your iPhone. Here’s how to get Apple’s panorama mode working on your iPhone 4, iPhone 4S or iPad 2.

It’s a pretty easy tweak to set up. If you want to make things easy for yourself, just load up Cydia on your jailbroken device and download Firebreak. Once Cydia installs the tweaks, the panorama toggle will be available in the Camera app’s options menu.

Like to get your hands dirty? If you can access your iPhone or iPad’s com.apple.mobileslideshow.plist, just change the value of “EnableFirebreak” to “Yes.”

It’s a cool little easter egg, no doubt, but to me, it feels like Apple left it out of iOS 5 for a reason. It feels a little cumbersome, a little hard to use. More an iOS developer’s own proof-of-concept than the kind of elegant, simple-to-use feature Apple likes to showcase.

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