iOS 5
 

So I did the upgrade yesterday on my iPhone 3GS... and I want three hours of my life back.

The upgrade was a grueling process, as iTunes for some reason had to back up everything on the phone, write the new OS to it, and then copy all my apps and data back to the phone. Unfortunately, iTunes crashed three hours into the upgrade, having restored all of my apps but none of my media. When I tried to sync the phone to get the media onto it, iTunes helpfully offered to backup and re-initialize the phone once more. No thanks.

Anyway, here's what's different in the new iOS, as far as I can tell:

• Pull-down notifications screen. This would be nice if it were more functional -- but there are many apps which won't show up on it even though they obviously should. Mail doesn't work with it, for instance. Why the heck not? :td:
• Week calendar view. I've been using the Week Cal app for a while to get this function, and it works really well. Apple's implementation is really bad; there is no zooming, so you can only see the same three hours of three days at once. What's the point? :td:
• Newsstand. Oh joy. Now I can pay to read the MSM on my phone. :rolleyes:
• Syncing over Wi-Fi. This would be kind of cool... if my computer was willing to cooperate with my phone. :(
• Reminders app. I can't figure out how I'm supposed to use this. It can't tell whether it's a calendar or a to-do list. :confused:
• Old "iPod" app is now split into "Music" and "Videos" apps. Oh joy. Another icon I don't need on my home screen. :td:

The good news is that iOS 5 makes it possible to avoid using iTunes on the desktop entirely. The bad news is that there are many things you still cannot do without a computer that has iTunes, such as automatically updating podcasts and adding MP3s to your music library.

If Steve had a grave, I think he would be rolling in it now...

2 hours to update iPad 2. I'm largely pleased with the end result, however.

I forgot to mention iMessage, because I still can't get it to work, nor can I tell why I need it.

After upgrade, it goes through some setup screens. I couldn't get beyond find my ipad. Whatever I answered, touching next did nothing. I finally turned off, turned back on.

Are people using cloud, find my ipad, etc.?

iMessage is the one thing I didn't have any issues getting to work (after spending most of the day trying to get my iPhone updated). Since most of the people I regularly text to have iPhones, I can change my unlimited texting plan to a lesser one to save some money on my cell bill.

Its never a good idea to upgrade on the first day out. Wait a few days and you'll be a lot happier.

Any jailbreak yet?

My iPad 2 took slightly less than an hour, and I started the process within minutes of the availability of iOS5 through iTunes. No glitches or issues so far, other than the new multi-touch gestures making Fruit Ninja more challenging than it needs to be :(

Setup on my ipad2 took almost 2 hours, followed by a crash and then a restore. But we're good to go now.
Found my screen a little less responsive. Maybe it was just me.
Haven't tried iMessage yet.

Sometime before complaining it's better to have a look at what someone is complaining about...

Notifications lack apps or even mail???

Have you tried to click on "Notifications" into "Settings"? You can set up any app that send notifications to show up, including, of course mail, deciding wether you prefer a pop-up or a message on the top-bar, if you want them to show on the lock screen to or not, etc..

3 hours? There must be something wrong with your iPhone.. The whole update process took 20 minutes to me.. 9 minutes to back up, 3 minutes to update, 8 minutes to have all my data back into my phone.

Reminder app is the best reminder app out there.. You can set up reminders to show up when you get close to a place, an address, or some co-ordinates, I never had something like that before and it's really useful.
Think about "reminder to call wife when I get out of the office" and when you get out of the office, whatever time it is, it buzz. I love it.

And iMessage is going to save a lot of money to a lot of people..

I think iOS5 is the biggest firmware updated until now, second only to the 2.0 when they introduced the app-store.

I am pretty sure that I am not missing anything -- Mail (as in email) is not an option for notifications. "Messages" is an option -- but I don't use Messages much. (SMS is such a barbaric communication system; I don't know why Americans and Europeans love it so much.)

As far as I can tell, that functionality doesn't exist unless you have the new iPhone with Siri.

I'm pretty sure that you do are missing something.

If you click on Notifications into Settings there's a list of all the apps that use notifications and you can decide for each one of them the notification settings.
Mail (an in email) is the 6th one.

And that functionality does exist, and it has nothing to do with Siri.
Just click on reminder, set up a reminder and have a look around. You can choose wether to set an alarm or a "zone".

Tethered jailbreak only, though if you plan to jailbreak I'd wait a week or so.

iMessage is great. (especially if you don't have unlimited sms plan and if you do you might want to reevaluate.)

it's all good. facetime activation finally worked for me as well (unlocked iphone 4 on t-mo prepaid, no data plan). Previously, I never got the activation messages. Not sure if it was coincidental to ios5 or not, because I gave up on it before.

-David

Ah, you're right. The mail app was buried deep in the lower list of useless apps from which I would never want pop-up notifications... I would not have figured out how to get mail notifications by myself.

This I still can't find. I can choose "Remind Me," and then it asks for a date. Or I can set a priority or add notes. But those are the only options available. Nothing about "zones" anywhere.

Maybe I am just getting old and having trouble adjusting, but these new apps seem really non-intuitive.

I can't speak as to you, but I have friends with iPhones in Dubai, Australia, an the UK. We have been using Whatsapp to text for free. iMessage would be similarly helpful. The thing is Whatsapp is very cheap and often free and is cross platform so you can chat with friends using Blackberries, Nokias, and Androids as well.

Same here. Very slight difference

Mine wasn't showing up either, I had to set Reminders up in iCloud settings and then also, change my reminder "list" to icloud. You can read about it here

https://discussions.apple.com/thread...art=0&tstart=0

Also, Some are saying it is not available on 3gs ...

Must be disabled on the 3GS. On the 4, after you enter the reminder you have a choice to "Remind Me" "On a Day", or "At a Location". When you select "At a Location" you can select "When I Leave" or "When I Arrive", then choose the location either Current Location or a location from your address book.
You can also set a priority and include notes in the reminder.

This is a great new feature that I already used a couple times yesterday. I already have it set to remind me to do something when I get to work this morning.

With the iPhone 4S, I'm assuming you can set these reminders using Siri voice recognation.

Another nice new feature is the ability to quickly access your camera from the lock screen and take a picture using the volume up button.

Yeah, mail works fine in notifications, it is turned off by default since I think it would be a lot of mail for most coming out of the gates. They would most likely ALL appear to be NEW with a new device. I turned it off again after testing it, I don't need pop-ups. I have things like textfree setup for notifications and a couple others. I woud like to see things like copilot and some other GPS add to the notification screen.

ONE thing I don't like and maybe it is just user error, but at least on the iphone 4, with reminders one cannot actually SET an address for location based reminders. The only option for setting a location is to select a CONTACT and their respective address. This works fine for HOME and something like that, but for a random event and location it seems cumbersome. I'd like to be able to just select from a map, googlemaps etc., and have that proximity work.

Looks like only current location or contact address. Another thing it looks like if you use location reminder, the GPS is constantly active which may affect battery life.

Apple's servers were slammed on Wednesday. Hence many people's 2-3 hour experience was do to numerous retries to connect with the servers.

Agreed, things seems to be taking a little longer (power on, time to respond to pressing an icon). Small but noticeable. Also feel like power draw when using the iPad is higher. My son was playing rocket math last night and I was surprised to see 93% after only 15 minutes of playing.
Upgrade also was very painful, one failed backup (error -5000, with no help from google). Next backup took almost 2 hours and then I went to bed. In the morning it had applied the update but no apps and no music and no anything. Had to do a 2 stage restore with several app installs erroring with various iTunes
- Tim

I haven't noticed any slowdown on iPad 2 or iPhone 4, but my wife said her iPhone seems to be draining battery quicker.

I have had some freezing problems with iTunes on windows 7.

A bad feechur:

If iOS 5 becomes constained on storage space, it will automagically invoke a
new "cleanup" feechur ... and delete (your) data files to free-up space ...
without asking.

Grrrr.

You seem to think that Steve Jobs had no say in the way iOS 5 was fashioned. Probably not so. If you dislike iOS so much you know you could just sell your phone on eBay or Craigslist and by a Droid if you really don't like the way it turned out.

If you can't get Reminders working, then check out Reqall. It is similar and has voice services.

A bunch of developers really dislike that - they figure they'll be blamed for the data files disappearing.

BTW, it seems possible to downgrade back to 4.3 if you find 5 distasteful. Lots of how-to info out there.

I tried it out in beta, downgraded back to 4.3.3. Somehow lost all my contacts and itunes backups when I upgraded. Not a huge deal as I had them backed up elsewhere too, but still :confused:

Oh look, another Apple fanboy who thinks Apple can do no wrong, and critics should return their iOS devices rather than make legitimate complaints. These types of response are really non-helpful, and seem all too common with the Apple cult.

FWIW, I really like the form and functionality of iOS, and probably won't be moving over to Droid any time soon -- if only because Apple does internationalization way better than Google does. I need a phone that can "speak" both English and Japanese, and the iPhone is basically the only one on the market that can with any level of "fluency."

But this version is a disappointment. I'm still trying to fix the phone so it will sync with my media library again. No dice...

Nice to see Apple pull a Microsoft with the "newstand" crapware that can't be deleted and can't be shoved off into a folder like other crapware (youtube, stocks) :mad:

For wi-fi sync, you have to plug in the phone to the computer, go into iTunes, and select "Sync over Wi-Fi" (or something like that ... I had to check mark something, but now my iPhone syncs over wifi)

Although I'm not a fan of these extra apps I don't need ... videos? Newsstand?

And while I like the local weather feature, why doesn't the iPad have a weather app or stock app?? Seriously, I feel like those would be great on the iPad given some extra functionality!

you can
 

you CAN move it, it just takes a bit of fast fingers. Put IT an another item into a folder together, while you move item A into a NEW folder, quickly move newstand in to the same NEW folder too. Done. It won't WORK from within the folder, but it keeps it out of reach.

Move it to an empty last page of apps and forget about it?

Just sayin.

It's actually the app I use the most on the iPad -- magazines/newspapers look great on the iPad, and it helps to have them all in a newsstand instead of cluttering things up with individual magazine/news apps and folders.

Or perhaps there is something super-duper-special about your computer or iOS device - On my 64GB iPad, backups take hours and hours. Granted, I have an insane amount of apps, but I don't think I've ever seen an update or backup finish in under 2 hours.

if it regularly takes that long to back up your iDevice, there may be a corrupted app. Read more here:

http://apdevblog.com/slow-itunes-sync-backup/

A year or so back, I noticed my phone would take hours to sync. I ended up deleting some news apps and after that, backups were done in minutes.

Hi fanboy!

Folders allowed me to consolidate phone apps.

Wirelessly posted (iPhone 3G: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_0 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9A334 Safari/7534.48.3)

But you described it as "crapware"? Why would you want to put something you described as crapware in a folder? Obviously not ideal that it can't be deleted, but the suggestion is the next best option.