iOS5...Finally Updated My iPad 1

I decided that since I've heard good things about iOS5 on the original iPad that it was time to update. There are a few new features in iOS5 that was making it attractive. According to Apple, there are more than 200 new features in iOS5. To be honest, there are probably less than a dozen that I was interested in. But it's done and I can now see what all the hype is all about.

Since I just finished this update, this post is not about iOS5 features. I want to talk just a bit about the upgrade procedure. This is a major upgrade to Apple's mobile operating system - iOS. When I went from 3 to 4 it didn't seem to be a major produciton. This time it took a bit of time and there was plenty of data to transfer and several reboots.

The first thing you need to do is get the latest iTunes, for me it was 10.5.1 (MacBook with 10.5.8 Leopard). This is pretty simple to do using the Software Updates feature built into OS X. After I had iTunes all updated then I plugged in my original iPad and told it to update it to iOS 5.0.1. It told me that this would take an hour or more and to not start this because you cannot stop the procedure once it starts.

To do this update iTunes will do a complete backup of the device, my iPad, and then do a full restore with the new iOS5. This upgrade of just the iOS took a good 20 minutes. After another iPad restart it then did some other update. Another reboot then my content, apps, books, music, video, etc., was then copied back.

All together I would say that it took more than an hour. I didn't look to see what time it actually started, but I estimate the time at about 80 minutes. Of course this time will depend on the content on your iOS device. If you have lots of music and not much else this might go faster. My iPad has 32GB of storage and it's about two thirds full. The majority of the space used on my iPad is Apps and videos. These are large files and probably do take a bit of time to move to my computer then back to the iPad.

Everything went just fine with the upgrade. If you plan to update your device my best advice is to make sure you have the time to do it. If your iTunes is on a laptop make sure you are plugged in. If you are on a desktop, make sure your power won't get interrupted at any time during the update.

Now that this is all done I can start to play with new iOS5 features. The big ones are Reminders, new notifications, Newsstand, new gestures, and Messages. More on how these work and other features later on.