With the release of iOS 5 this week by Apple, most of the iPhone users in the world were faced with the possibility of getting the update fairly immediately. Unfortunately, my iPad 2 did not see the update until yesterday. With a bit of trepidation, I went ahead and took the plunge. Yes, both feet in and updated.
While my iPhone 3gS had updated to iOS 5 smoothly, the download for the iPad 2 seemed to drag on forever in relation. It took nearly 40 minutes to download and obviously the Apple servers were straining under the load. Lucky for me, the download completed and the install began.
What bothered me initially was the fact that my iPad 2 seemed to have lost everything from its pages. All my apps and data were gone. I nearly went into shock, especially in light of having seen articles about the issues some users had this week with servers not being available or their units being bricked by the update. Yet, when I restarted the sync, I found that my fears were unfounded as the sync restored all of the apps and the data to its previous state. I was once again back in business.
Unfortunately, like the iPhone, iCloud wants to take over all your machines whether you want it to or not. This happened with the iPhone, the iPad 2 and even my MBP when I updated the OS there as well. (Another story). Wishing Apple had put iCloud only as an option would have been too much especially since they seem to be wanting everyone to use their service whether they want to or not. Once again, I chose not to and have all my machines backed up to an external hard disk. Thus iCloud seems to be a bit overkill when you are syncing with a single machine and backing up to hard disk each day.
So far the only glitch in installation seems to be the fact that certain apps need to be updated in order to run on the iPad 2 under iOS 5. One game on my machine had a very apparent video issue and had to be restarted in order to clear it. Other than that, the installation was smooth, easy and nearly the exact way that Steve Jobs would have wanted it to be.
