First-Gen iPad May Not Get All Of iOS 5’s New Features

Unlike iOS 4, Apple’s promised not to leave any iOS devices behind with the jump to iOS 5, but older devices might lose some features. The iPhone 3GS under iOS 5 tellingly doesn’t support many of iOS’s new photo abilities, but even last year’s iPad might get the short thrift with the latest version of Apple’s mobile operating system: users are reporting that the original iPad running iOS 5 does not support the new gesturing feature.

What’s gesturing? It allows you to use four or five fingers to swipe up to reveal the multitasking bar, pinch to return to the home screen and swipe left or right to switch between apps.

Gesturing was present in the original iOS 4.3 betas, and is also promised to land in iOS 5, and indeed it does apparently work on the iPad 2 under iOS 5… but not the first-gen iPad.

It’s a strange omission, given that gesturing works just fine under iOS 4.3 on the iPad. Our guess is that while this could indicate that Apple’s is going to prune features from iOS 5, it’s most likely one of (many) bugs that are ubiquitous in Apple’s iOS developer previews, and will be fixed by the time the next beta comes around.

At least, we hope so: we’d hate to see Apple already looking for cool features to purge from their revolutionary, year-old tablet. What do you think? Bug or purposeful omission?

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