Rumorama: iPhone Exchange Support, Cool New Interfaces Coming?

For those of you looking for jobs at Apple, you're in luck! Apple has posted two new job listings that coincidentally also give us hints on what Apple is working on for the near future:

The first job is for an "iPhone Windows Outlook/Exchange QA Eng":

The iPhone Quality team is looking for a motivated, highly-technical Exchange test/sync engineer with excellent problem solving and communication skills. You will join a dynamic team responsible for qualifying the latest iPhone products. Your focus will be testing Exchange and Outlook functionality with Apple’s innovative new phone.

That's right folks, it looks like Apple is serious about adding full Exchange and ActiveSync support to the iPhone so that they can expand into the corporate market. Good news for all those suits that wish to jump on the bandwagon (not to mention Apple's coffers.)

The second job is for a "SW Prototype Application Design Engineer," but that's a little vague, so we'll go with the description:

HID SW is responsible for delivering the firmware and software for Apple’s Input Devices, such as Multi-touch for iPhone, cameras, and remote controls. The team is a key part in driving an integrated customer experience involving new HW and SW designs, working with creative, smart people, world-class products and cutting edge technologies.

HID SW is looking for a SW Prototype Application Design Engineer that will design and develop prototype software to showcase new technologies, user interface concepts and system usage concepts within Apple.

Cutting through the PR BS, there's some key bits of information there, as pointed out by Macrumors: multi-touch, camera, remote controls, new interface designs. Could this mean a resurfacing of the Apple Universal Remote? What do cameras have to do with multi-touch displays? Perhaps Apple is exploring ways to make the famous Minority Report interface (the one everyone seems to love but no one has made feasible) work?

In any case the person who lands that job will most certainly have fun playing with lots of cool new toys in the Cupertino labs.

Unfortunately, not every job offering and position leads to an actual product or feature being released by Apple, as there's a lot of devices that never seem to make it out of the labs, but at least we know that Apple is serious about expanding both its iPhone line and its human interface division.

Coupled with all the patents Apple has been applying for recently in regards to human interfaces, it seems Apple's long term plans include positioning itself as a leading provider of new interfaces for computers and gadgets in the future. This, of course will once again bring it in direct competition with efforts by Microsoft, who has made news in the past year with its Microsoft Surface concepts.