Though hardly infallible, the practice of digging through the code of Apple’s iOS update is a time-honored way to find clues about what Apple might have coming down the pipeline. Apple recently released the third beta of iOS 5.1, the next update to their mobile operating system, and developers have found some interesting nuggets hidden away in the code.

Tucked away in the code for iOS 5.1 are references to the iPad 3 – probably both wi-fi and cellular data models – and possible Facebook integration. There doesn’t seem to be much to the iPad references apart from the fact that they exist. Previous examinations of the iOS betas have revealed that Apple appears to be readying quad-core processors for the iPad 3 and iPhone 6.

The big news is the references to possible Facebook integration. One of the biggest features of iOS 5 when it launched in autumn 2011 was OS-level integration with Twitter, allowing users to post photos, share web links, and more to Twitter without using a Twitter client. It has long been rumored that Apple was pursuing a similar deal with Facebook, and that the difficulty in coming to an agreement is what prompted Apple to deal with Twitter instead. While these references in iOS 5.1 may be remnants of Apple’s preparations for Facebook integration in iOS 4, it seems more likely that we will see Facebook integration sometime soon – perhaps as early as iOS 5.1, or at least with iOS 6, which will probably launch with the iPhone 6 this summer.

[Source: iMore]