trishussey
on
Have you updated your iOS device to iOS 5 yet? No? According to early reports 30% of devices that could update to iOS 5 did so in the first week alone (C|Net). Beyond everything you can consider Apple hype and fanboyism, that’s still pretty darn impressive. Still, a lot of people hold off on updating for good reasons. Some want to wait until the first point release (5.0.1 or something) to fix any little bugs. Others don’t see the big deal and “will get around to it eventually”. Well even if iMessage and better Notifications (much better, like not annoying any longer) don’t sway you, how about faster browsing with Safari?
Yeah it turns out that regardless of your device (even down to the iPhone 3GS), Safari 5.1 loads pages about twice as fast as Safari 5.0 did. Yeah, 2x times faster. Not too shabby!
Nope, these data didn’t come from Apple either. A mobile app performance company,New Relic, did the analysis and published the results for the world to jaw-drop at. I think it’s pretty amazing that you can get this kind of performance jump with a basic update. Sure “a little faster” would be acceptable for most of us. Heck we might take “slightly faster” unless we’re using the iPhone 4S or iPad 2. Sometimes we’ll even take “anything is better than bringing my device to a crawl” as some previous iOS updates have done (think iOS 4 and the iPhone 3G for example). So I’m pretty stoked about twice as fast.
Have I noticed the speed bump? See that’s the thing, it’s hard to tell if you can’t compare things side by side. I surf a lot on both my iPhone and iPad and I think apps and pages are loading pretty fast. I haven’t been thinking “man, my iPad is just a brick since I updated…”, not that there aren’t a bunch of apps that still need some iOS 5 updates to make them a wee more stable.
If you’ve decided that it’s time to update your device here’s what you need to do:
- Launch iTunes (make sure you’ve updated to the latest version of iTunes, btw)
- Connect your device
- Transfer purchases from your device (usually this is done when you sync, but better safe than sorry)
- Back up your device (right-click on your device name to get the menu to do this easily)
- Click the update/upgrade button and …
- Wait
I can’t stress enough the waiting part. I messed up my iPhone update (the backup didn’t restore fully) because I started fiddling with my iPhone before everything is done. It took my iPad about 2–3 hours to update and it went smoothly …. because I just left it alone and let it do it’s thing. Same deal with my wife’s iPhone 4 … just let it run. Watch a movie, go to bed, run a marathon (okay maybe that’s too much time), do anything away from the device so you’re not tempted to check it so it can just run. Trust me, you’ll be much happier in the end.
You’ll know when everything is done and then you’ll just need to walk through a few new setup steps and you’ll be good to go.
Just remember to wait.
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