Will Kelly

I watched the launch of the iPhone 4s and iOS 5 with great anticipation. Apple product launches are always worthy of watching. After matching up my personal predictions versus what actually delivers is an annual tradition of mine. It’s also a lot of fun to learn how far off some of the analysts, pundits, and journalists are off in their predictions. Though as time goes on, my viewing of Apple product launches are about learning what I can from live blogging, and then piece together the rest of the news that evening after I get home and the server traffic dies down after the live session.

Last weekend, I upgraded my iPhone 4 to iOS 5 after a successful (albeit time consuming)  upgrade of my first generation iPad 3G to the new OS. The overall upgrade of my iPhone went relatively smooth – I did it on a Friday night before going to bed – without the server errors that dogged my iPad upgrade and many others on launch day.

Here are the iOS 5 highlights (for me at least):

Twitter integration. iOS 5 comes with full Twitter integration which I am happy to see since I frequently use Twitter from my iPad and iPhone. I will definitely use it to share photos I take from my iPhone camera and want to see what other uses come out of the integration before I pass final judgment though.

iCloud integration. Apple’s launch of iCloud is already shaking up the online storage and synchronization market if Box.net giving their iOS users 50 GB of storage space for free. Being one of those with a legacy MobileMe address and Apple IDs I was a bit disappointed that the iCloud setup and login is not ready for that use case right out of the box. Currently, I am experimenting with backing up my iPhone and iPad online versus synchronizing with my PC by running the backups when I go to sleep for the night.

Performance bump (?). It might be my imagination but my iPhone 4 feels like a brand new phone since I made the upgrade to iOS 5.

Updated weather app. The weather in my local area has really s**ked for a while now so I appreciate how the new Weather app has an hourly breakdown. Not that the app is necessarily always right but with all the rain we’ve had over the past month or two I like the idea of being able to drill down into my view of the weather forecast.

Tabbed browsing. The addition of tabbed browsing to Mobile Safari is a nice touch and real easy to enjoy on my iPad.

I haven’t really explored the reported multitasking gestures yet. In the end, with the upgrade to iOS 5 on my iPhone, I am going to sit out the iPhone 4s and wait for the iPhone 5. If Apple holds true to form, then the iPhone 5 should offer some major hardware and software enhancements.

Have you upgraded to iOS 5?