On Wednesday morning, I happily connected my iPhone 4 to my MacBook Pro via the USB cable, for the very last time. I fired up iTunes and clicked “Check for Updates” at 10am PST, hoping that I would be able to successfully download iOS 5.
After a bit if waiting, I was able to grab the update at a reasonable download speed. In fact, the update went much faster than I initially anticipated. Remembering how popular major iOS updates tend to be, I expected the download to slow to a crawl, as Apple’s servers surely would have been taxed. I guess that billion dollar data centre in North Carolina is completely prepared to handle millions of simultaneous database connections in a short period of time. Certainly I was impressed at this point.
I decided to do a clean install of iOS 5, instead of doing a more typical restore from backup. My policy with major iOS updates is to always perform a clean install, and then install the apps that I need, one at a time.
While I love iOS 5 as a whole, it’s not without some pretty glaring issues that I think are unacceptable. I’ll preface this rant with the fact that I do know these issues will probably get plugged soon.
Safari
I was testing out the new private browsing mode, and had tried switching back and forth between privacy modes. At some point when I closed Safari and tried to re-open it, Safari.app crashed. I then decided to force close the app and then reboot my iPhone, however this didn’t make a difference. How odd. To get Safari working again, I had to into Settings > General > Reset and reset my networking settings back to factory defaults. I haven’t been able to reproduce this issue again, but it’s pretty strange that was my first experience with iOS 5.
Music
With iOS 5, iPod.app has been separated into two separate apps (as they should be), music and now video are their own apps. I decided to wirelessly sync some Podcasts to my iPhone to test things out. I created my own custom playlist and added all unplayed Podcasts to it. After I finished listening, I wanted to delete the playlist. After tapping edit to delete my playlist, Music.app instantly force quit. How lovely!
I’m sure I’ll run into a few other bugs, however I’m quite surprised that these issues snuck their way into the GM build of iOS 5. Here’s hoping the next build fixes a few lingering issues.
If any ZD readers have encountered any other bugs that you want to share, please share your findings, as I’d love to start building a list of issues people are having.