Apple iOS 5 Upgrade Review Discussion

[Jen Edwards]

The day users of the iPhone 4, iPad, and iPod touch have been waiting for has arrived: iOS 5 is now available. Brighthand has everything you need to know to ensure a smooth upgrade, as well as a review of the new features.

Read the full content of this Article: Apple iOS 5 Upgrade Review

[Ed Hardy]

I'm glad this is the last update that has to be done by hooking the device to a PC. I'm on the road a continent away from my desktop. I've had to be satified with reading about iOS 5 so far, but I'll be able to make the move tonight.
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[Varjak]

I've heard lots of problems with updating right now (a crush of people I guess); and with iCloud.

While reading your review, it occurred to me that they seem to be turning the iPhone (sadly) into more of a 'dumb terminal' that's too reliant on the 'cloud.' I can't edit my photostream, so everything gets dumped there and eventually pushed out? What kind of design is that? And the Instapaper-not-like function also seems useless without on-device storage. Of course, one can get Instapaper or one of the other apps instead.

[r0k]

I just discovered "image capture". I've been using eyefi to get photos off my iPhone but with videos it's s-l-o-w. When I found I only had 220 meg free I knew I had to do something. So I deleted useless apps, like borders ebook reader among others and got close to a gig back. Still my phone was jam packed.

An Apple support guy told me I could drag photos off my phone in Finder. I never got that to work but a quick trip to google brought me around to image capture.app. I got all the photos off my "camera roll" and now have 9 gig free. It's like having a new phone. I'm hoping there's a way to tell iCloud to only leave 200 photos on the device. I really don't need 1,000. It was only 1500 photos that had chewed up 8 gig on my phone!

Meanwhile, iOS 5 is downloading. It says 3 hours remaining and it started an hour ago. I guess this is the "peak" time everybody is getting it. Oh well. Maybe I'll decide to install it tomorrow.

[Magellan]

I have an iPad 2 and the notifications are much improved. Not on par with Android yet but getting there.

[Jen Edwards]

The cloud has a few shortcomings and caveats, that's for sure. But then again, iCloud isn't required, you can upgrade to iOS5, enjoy all of the other new features, and keep syncing with Outlook, backing up to your local computer instead of to the cloud, etc.

The jury's still out for me--some parts of iCloud really work for me, but others don't, mainly because I've already standardized on Google for contacts and calendar and Dropbox for all of my documents and photos. I'm still trying it out and trying to figure out what's best for my needs, but it's comforting to know that I can always fall back to Outlook syncing if necessary.

[Jen Edwards]

I have an iPad 2 and the notifications are much improved. Not on par with Android yet but getting there.

I'll agree, they're much better now--having the first line of new email messages pop up at the top of the screen and on the lock screen is really handy. I would like to see some improvements, such as offline support for the weather widget (why can't it just display the last results, instead of an error when I leave an area with WiFi?)

I'm hoping that we'll see some cool stuff from developers soon.

[r0k]

It was notifications more than iCloud that pushed me to put iOS 5 on my devices. I went to a football game tonight and needed to take a photo. Needless to say the corporate IT dimwits with their 15 minute timeout and complex password requirement would have caused me to miss just about anything I wanted to photograph tonight. Thank god I can double click home to get to the camera. Only one question. Why the hell isn't it there for a single click? If it's important enough to include on the lock screen, it's important enough to not require extra clicks or jumping through any hoops. Remember I'm trying to capture a touchdown pass, not remember the subtle timing of a double home button click. I'm sure the double click will be gone with iOS 5.0.1!

Of course Comcast is doing some sort of net neutrality violation here. I've had to download several 1 Gig OS 10.7.2 updates and several 700 meg iOS updates. They were taking 18 minutes each at 5pm but for the past few hours they have been clocking in at 6+ hours. Then they stopped altogether and I couldn't even ping yahoo. I had to reset my cable modem. AGAIN. I wish At&t's fiber was closer to my house. At&t might be worse than Comcast customer service but nothing is worse than Comcast's reliability. So what was showing up as a 5 to 6 hour download before resetting my cable modem (from the surfboard configuration page) is now a 32 minute download. It's not Apple's server that can't handle it. It's Comcast.

[ward.smith]

I have a verizon iphone 4 and tried to update to ios5 and had a frimware problem that rendered my phone useless. After 2 days of discussions with applecare and various friends and trying a multitude of things, I want the the apple store and they confirmed that my phone is now useless and gave me a new one. Unfortunately the firmware problem caused me to loose all of my data but at least I have a brand new phone that works. They said that this same thing has happened to several other people as well. Their server just did something at the wrong time. Silver lining: this gives me an opportunity to decide what I want on my new phone.