Last week Apple released its latest mobile operating system, iOS5, which is designed to power iPads, and newer iPhones and iPods. This new OS claims to have more than 200 enhancements. I plan to dig deeply into this claim and report my findings here. I'd love to get your input as well.
Le's take a look at the upgrade process. This is the last upgrade that is supposed to require a connection to a computer. I connected my iPad 1 to my Mac and kicked off the upgrade. I needed to upgrade my iTunes to the latest version, which added some time to what became a rather lengthy process.
Once I had upgraded iTunes, the system insisted on backing up my current iPad configuration, even though I had done so just a couple of hours earlier. The backup is horribly slow (a fact noted many times in Apple's support forums). I admit, my 64GB iPad is more than 2/3 full of books, music, magazines and apps, but still...
After more than four hours the backup finished and the iOS5 install began. It took about an hour for the software itself to download. Then the installer reformatted my device and installed a bare-bones version of the operating system.
Once the operating system was installed, it went on to restore my original configuration - settings, apps, etc. Again, this was a time-intensive process, but my only interaction was to keep checking to see if this process had completed. Finally, after another couple of hours the process was finished. Anxious to check out all the new features I picked up my and found -
Virtually all my apps had been restored to my desktop, not the original folders. I'm sporting a couple hundred apps, so it was a real PITA to have to go through eight or nine screens of icons and drag them back to their proper folders.
Total time for the upgrade: about seven hours (not counting the shuffling of the icons). Was it worth it? Cautiously yes. The Apple servers have been really slow (inundated no doubt by millions of people upgrading). Some of the cool new features like online backup iCloud and Newsstand are undoubtedly suffering due to the crazy amount of traffic. Hopefully things will ease up as the majority of people looking to upgrade complete the process.
Check back over the next few weeks to get some updates on the hottest features and find out what others are saying. Please feel free to share your thoughts and experiences as well.
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