I’m not having nearly the problems some seem to be. Of course, I was downloading at 10 AM on a multi-gigabit connection to one of the original ARPANET nodes. Speed kills.
Speaking of speed, I have not noticed a material drop in performance going to iOS 5 on an iPhone 4. After the choke that iOS 4 put on my 3G in the day or so before getting my new phone last year, I was wary. Everything seems to be fine, though. I wouldn’t say it’s any faster (SNAPPY!!!!!!!!)* but it certainly seems responsive, even with using things like Notification Center or the new lock-screen camera launcher.
I’m actually drilling on that camera function. Wake up button, double-click home button, tap camera icon and you’re live, then just volume-up to shoot – for some reason I keep flipping the camera around before hitting the volume button. Which will suck if I wind up taking a picture of myself at those moments when I’m trying to snap a fast candid shot. The trick will be hitting all the necessary mechanical buttons on the way out of the pocket, so all I have to do is tap the screen to go live…
Everything seems to be fine. New notifications are unobtrusive, the iMove Trailers app replaced about three others for me, iCloud backup seems to be working and sync via Wi-Fi is fully functional, even when a different account is logged in and mine is in the background. This will be critical to the long-term plans for the house. It also doesn’t hurt that I can initiate a Wi-Fi sync from the computer, and keep using the phone normally while everything else updates. Handy!
App updates are coming in by the bushel basket, for sure. Everybody’s rewriting for 5 compatibility, which I presume mostly revolves around notifications. Hell, I’m putting the ESPN app back on just to get score alerts on gameday now. It’s that kind of tinkering that makes it impossible to gauge the battery-life impact…it’ll be a couple of days before I stop screwing around with it long enough to get a realistic measure of how long it goes between charges.
Now to test the Airport Utility. That and WatchESPN would pretty much put the laptop to bed for good…