gdgt

iOS 5 is on my iPhone 4. All the features are great... except newsstand. I will never use this app and since its a "folder" it cannot be buried in another folder. Personally, I would delete it (if i could).

I've been loving it so far. My only gripes are that Newsstand is treated as a folder, which means I can't tuck it away, and that Music and Video are two separate apps (I always preferred the unified iPod). Other than that, I love it.

Not really a gripe, but I'd like it better if I could collapse empty sections in the Notifications tray like you could with LockInfo.

I can't find the article I saw this quote in earlier today, but it basically said that "iOS 5 is the update we've been waiting for all along."

Seriously, iOS finally has basically every major feature people have been either complaining about or desiring for the last 5 years. Multitasking, copy and paste, third-party apps, tethering / hotspot, and sweet, sweet, notifications. Oh my goodness, hello, notifications.

So yeah -- I'm pretty stoked! About the only thing I'm missing is related to some random jailbreak stuff: scrolling folders (for unlimited storage of apps) and SBSettings, for quick access to various hardware features (airplane mode, brightness, orientation lock, etc).

Comparing the release version of iOS 5 to beta 1 is like comparing night to day. I love every single new feature. I wish Newsstand was a little more fleshed out at this point, but that will come.

The biggest problem I'm having is some iCloud stuff. Was getting some login errors for a little while, had to reset my password. Now it's a struggle to get my bookmarks to sync over iCloud from Safari.

Safari 5.1.1 is super buggy right now.

I haven't had a chance to play around with it too much but I wish they had built gestures into Safari for back/forward like they have with the trackpads.

Didn't see anyone mention the new split keyboard! Makes thumb typing possible and so much more comfortable. Just wish apple would add real typing prediction like I have on Android.

I received an error 3200 while updating. So as first impressions go this sucks.

The new notification system is easily the best new feature of iOS 5.

I dislike that I can't play with the other children and upgrade because I only have an iPod touch 2nd-gen, and the bare minimum is a 3rd-gen. It had to happen eventually.

I posted this yesterday in a different place, thought I'd copy it over to here, with a couple of added sentences after further reflection:

Running on a 4th Gen iPod Touch here, since Friday, Oct., 7.

Reminders sounds interesting to me, but it's not as useful on a Touch, since I don't have real GPS-based location functionality. Mostly I just haven't thought to try using yet. It may be very handy once I do.

Safari: I like the Reader functionality and the Reading List is OK. Tabs would be nice to have on a non-iPad device. Privacy Mode seems to work, but you can't turn it back off (or I can't, at least) to use Safari without it -- once PM has been turned on once, Safari won't work without it, it just crashes shortly after starting up. Hard rebooting seems to fix it until the next time I use PM. I also don't like that you have to leave the Safari app and go into the Settings app to toggle Privacy Mode. One thing I really like in the new Safari is being able to open a link in a background window. This is my favorite new Safari feature, I really wish it would have been an option all along.

I like the Notifications, but since this isn't an iPhone, I don't get phone calls or texts... The types of notifications I do get are pretty limited. The weather widget is nice.

Wi-Fi sync has been problematic. I can't get my iPod and my computer to reliably see each other very often. When I have used it, it's very slow. The automatic sync that depends on the iPod being plugged into power seemed severely crippled, since the only power sources I have are my PCs and some 3rd party iPod docks. The docks disable Wi-Fi sync because you can't sync over Wi-Fi with an accessory connected. If I just plug into my PC, it just uses USB to sync, which is fine, because USB seems to be much, much faster. The only other power sources are USB to AC adapters and Apple's simple iPod docks. It doesn't seem like very many people would own those items, which makes the automatic syncing so much less useful.

I do absolutely love the fact that I can now sync (over USB or Wi-Fi) without interrupting whatever else I'm doing. Before, you couldn't play any games or do anything else while syncing. Now that I think about it, this is probably my absolute favorite iOS 5 feature.

The iCloud backup is probably fine, although I can't get it to work right today. Probably due to the setup of my network at work. My favorite thing about using iCloud to back up my iPod is that it will stop trying to backup to iTunes all the time, which should reduce the time it takes to sync.

I also think that the OTA updates and incremental updates will be a very nice feature going forward, although so far it obviously hasn't been useful yet.

Newstand is really annoying me, because I can't hide it in a folder with the rest of the built-in apps that I don't use. Apparently Newstand is a special folder of its own, so it can't be put in a folder. I'm not about to sign up for any magazine subscriptions just so I can read them on this small screen, which means I now have this app that I can't get rid of. I guess I'll just put it on the last page of apps, all by itself, so I don't have to see it.

The Twitter integration doesn't seem very important to me. I've rarely used Twitter in the past, and yesterday I signed up for a new account just to look around at the features. I still won't really use it, I'm sure. It seems funny that they would tie in a very specific service to the OS. Why not create an API for Twitter and other social or microblogging services to hook in to? If there was one social service that should be integrated, it would think it should really be Facebook, because it has 4 times as many members. But it sounds like Apple and Facebook don't really get along, so I guess Twitter's the next most well-known social service to hook up with.

Your mileage may vary, I know everyone uses their iDevices a little differently, so some of the features I don't care for may be very useful for everyone else. Overall, for the way I use it, I think it smooths out some rough edges (mostly notifications and being able to use it while syncing), while some of the other, more hyped-up features just really don't seem to apply to me. So it's not a huge update for me, but it is definitely welcome.

All in all, I like it A LOT. Notification center is great. I also like iCloud, the updates to the camera app and many other little tweaks.

However, I do have some issues with it - mainly regarding iMessage (see my separate thread regarding this issue at: gdgt.com­/question­/imessage­-how­-to­-properly­-receive...)

There are also some other annoying issues. For example: there seems to be a bug with flagging messages using Exchange mail servers (I tried that with Gmail's Exchange configuration). Flagged messages on the iPhone arrive as "unread" in my Gmail. There are also some bugs with the notes app (the sync to iCloud makes some of my notes change, and I can't understand how I can sync to iCloud notes that were previously created without iCloud) and with Twitter (when composing a tweet and multitasking to some other app and then going back - some parts of the tweet get lost). I'm just in my second or third day of trying this thing out so I will probably find some other issues.