Well, after becoming aware of the new gesture controls for switching
between applications in iOS 5 (see this week's Low End
Mac Round Table), my interest was piqued substantially.
One of my main beefs with iOS is the lack of multitasking, and being
able to switch between applications more quickly is emphatically not
multitasking in any substantive sense of the word, although I suppose
it's better than nothing.
Anyway, having to double pump the Home button to toggle the ersatz
"multitasking" feature has seemed to me glaringly inelegant solution on
what is otherwise an elegant machine, and an electromechanical analogue
switch seems egregiously inconsistent, as well as the inevitable
mechanical wear and tear on moving parts. Completely solid-state
gesture-based application switching is much more consistent and
desirable on a device like the iPad or other iOS gadgets - even though
in general I'm not a fan of gesture - based computer input.
Another exception is that doing an operating system upgrade this
quickly after the software is first released seems imprudently hasty to
my way of thinking, but I reasoned that unlike my Mac, my iPad 2 is not a mission-critical tool, so
if something went wrong, I wouldn't be inconvenienced production
capacity wise.
On Saturday I resolved to give it a go.
First, however, I had to get my MacBook in shape. Nominally, I
needed iTunes 10.5, which I hadn't yet bothered downloading, but when I
fired up Software Update, it turned out that there were quite a few
other updates I'd been procrastinating about, including a Snow Leopard
security update, an EFI firmware update, a Bluetooth update, and a
gaggle of application updates. I chose nine from the list that I
thought were most important and unleashed Software Update to download
132 MB of compressed software update installers and bring things more
up to date while I was at it. That ate up over an hour for the
download, installation, and a couple of reboots.
The progress bar initially estimated about 50 minutes for the
upgrade, but it soon became apparent that this was highly optimistic.
The first iOS 5 download attempt failed about an hour into the
process, with a dialog appearing informing me that the server had timed
out. Thanks a lot. At least I didn't get the dreaded Error 3200.
A second attempt met with greater success, and the download
completed, but it was evident that the iPad 2 wasn't cooperating,
and a number of dialogs appeared, the ultimate upshot being that I
would be obliged do a Restore run. That was apparently executed
successfully, until I discovered that either the iOS upgrade or the
software restore process had resulted in my entire collection of
third-party apps, downloaded over the past 3 months or so, had
disappeared without a trace. Not cool.
At least the iPod seems to be running iOS 5 smoothly, albeit
without much of a tangible speed increase that some reviewers had
reported, but it was past 3 a.m. when I finally called a halt to
re-downloading and installing, plus in some instances reconfiguring the
settings of, the apps I lost. Definitely not a positive first
impression.
Of course I was still eager to try out the application switching (I
refuse to dignify it with the term "multitasking") function using the
new gestures. Happily they work as well as I had hoped, which does add
a greater degree of refinement to the iOS experience.
That said, I'm constrained to acknowledge that with iOS 5 text
selection and editing, cutting, and pasting are still just as lame as
in iOS 4.3, email is still horrible - albeit with a few new features in
Mail app that some folks will appreciate but are pretty irrelevant to
the way I use email on the iPad, which is to say as little as possible.
iOS Mail is a dismal alternative to Eudora OSE or Thunderbird on my Mac
(I don't like the Mac OS X version of Apple's Mail either), and
webmail can be pretty pathetic in iOS as well - I've never attempted
any printing from the iPad, since I don't have a Bluetooth printer, but
what I'm hearing in reviews is that iOS printing is still awful.
On the other hand, I do really like what they've done with mobile
Safari in this version, adding real page tabs and the Reader
distraction-clearing function from the desktop edition. I'm generally
fairly indifferent about the desktop version of Safari and rarely use
it, but I would have already rated mobile Safari as the class of the
field in iOS browsers, and with this upgrade its opened up an even
wider lead over its competitors.
My general summary observation is that iOS is a worthwhile upgrade
and does offer improve performance, once you get past the challenge of
getting it downloaded and installed. But it's still no efficiency
production tool by a long shot. I still can't reconcile being without
real multitasking, a directory, and a desktop for serious computing.
