More interesting to me than the recent speculation surrounding a Dashboard-style widget system (itself capable of offering “multi-tasking” of sorts) is word of some very interesting items unearthed in the SDK:

1) File Sharing.  Yup you read that right.  As reported by 9to5Mac.com (kudos!), within the General section of Settings is a File Sharing On/Off toggle, under which is an Applications section, currently blank.  Presumably this would allow you to individually allow – or disallow – a given app from accessing the shared documents sandbox.  If so, I like this – it would give the user the ability to box-out any app that was causing problems or doing naughty things under the hood.

It may also have something to do with controlling whether/how the iPad “drive” appears on a mac desktop when connected.  That’s less interesting to me but would also be nice to have.

2) Video Chat. Yup, you read that right too.  So many of the nay-sayers have been lamenting the lack of a front facing camera with the ability to perform video chats.  Will there be a camera in the iPad Rev A?  Rev B?  iPhone 4?  We’ll know soon enough.  Either way, it’s incredibly exciting.  Oh, and FWIW – whenever it appears, and in whichever devices, I think we can be all but certain that the capability will be limited to wifi-only.  AT&T can hardly handle our phone calls as it is 🙂

They also tested the HTML5 version of YouTube, found lock-screen media controls, and pointed out the ‘blank’ key on the iPad’s keyboard dock.  That last item is part of the Dashboard/widget speculation.  And it, combined with a ‘Home’ button, may be enough to convince me to purchase the keyboard dock rather than a regular dock + standalone BT keyboard.  Hopefully Apple will ultimately offer a standalone BT keyboard with any iPad specific goodies…

Exciting stuff!