One of the reasons owners of the iPhone 3G and iPhone 3GS have been waiting for a jailbreak for iOS 4.1 is to enable the iPhone 4’s impressive HDR functionality on their older handsets… a hack which is already available for jailbroken 3G and 3GS users on the iOS 4.1 beta through a Cydia app.
It looks pretty likely, though, that these users won’t need to jailbreak their devices to enable HDR functionality… Apple seemingly intends to add HDR in a software update coming down the line.
The evidence was spotted by 9to5Mac, who nboticed that there are two HDR icons within the iOS SDK: one for Retina Display, and one without. They speculate this means that Apple has been planning to give older iPhone owners (particularly owners of the 3GS) HDR photographs all along.
Of course, there’s some other possibilities at play here. As 9to5Mac notes, they could have planned for older iPhones to get the functionality earlier in the dev cycle, then dropped it later on; alternatively, producing two versions of every icon might just be part of Cupertino’s workflow.
Let’s hope, though, that Apple does intend to give HDR to 3GS owners soon: they really don’t need to give anyone a good reason to jailbreak, do they?
