I am far from being an early-adopter.  In fact, aside from reading up on the news, issues, and short-comings of new technologies, I’m usually the last person I know to bite the bullet.  However since my job gave loaned me my Macbook Pro, iPhone, *and* iPad2, I figured the least I could do is help them out.

Worth the wait? Um, yeah.

I use the aforementioned devices primarily for work, and as such, am looking at iOS5 as far as its functionally from that prospective.

Caveats:
Oh yeah- a couple mundane details that affect my experiences:
1. I’m on an iPhone 3GS.  Whatever features unique to iPhone 4/4s, I didn’t get them.
2. I’m on Snow Leopard on the Macbook.   Whatever Lion-only niftiness there is, I don’t have those either.
3. I have not turned on iCloud as of this posting. Why not? Because: a) I don’t care. b) These aren’t my devices and could have them yanked from my at any moment, and c) My job backs up my MacBook regularly anyway.

Part One: The Install. To upgrade to iOS5 I needed to update iTunes. Which required me to update Safari for some lame reason.   I read a couple blog and Twitter posts yesterday about installs going wrong and a couple bricked iPhones.  I wasn’t one of them.  In fact the install process on all devices went about as seamless as possible.  The only hiccup was when updating my iPhone it asked me for a password to restore the phone- only, i’ve never put a password on it.  After ignoring the request a couple times my phone updated, bookmarks and all. I did have to reset my wallpaper though.  (*gasp!*)

On the iPad, I have no news to report.  It updated exactly as expected.

Part Two: First look. On first glance, nothing is really changed-  Oh the “Music” icon is a little more orange and the Voice Recorder icon is a little more blue.  Oh, and there’s a Newsstand app that I can’t seem to get rid of.  If you’re not paying attention, you wouldn’t even notice the update.  Then little things started to pop-up…

Part Three: The nitty-gritty. I lied about the phone update going seamless- all settings reverted back to their defaults.  The advantage of this though- it forced me to take a closer look at all the new options/features of iOS.  A few that stand out after just a couple hours:

Auto-syncing over wifi.  You’d think this is a little thing- this is actually a really really big deal.  Change anything on any device- add or remove an app or photo, make a note, start an email or podcast, re-arrange icons, etc. and the updates are made on all devices.  This feature alone is worth the hassle of the update.

Push notifications to the lock-screen. I turned them all on for kicks. It got annoying this morning before I even left the house. I could see where someone might like that though.

A ton more ringtones and alert tones.  One thing that always irked me was having only 5-6 alert tone options on the iPhone.  If you’re into that, then you’ll enjoy the variety.  If you’re like my co-worker who leaves everything on vibrate 100% of the time, you’ll never notice.

Twitter integration.  I mean, “post to Twitter” is now an option in like, everything.  If you’re into that, then you care. If you’re not, you won’t even notice.  It will be interesting to see if Twitter use goes up because of it.

Camera.  For still shots you have the option to turn on a grid overlay, if you’re into that whole rule-of-thirds thing.  No noticeable features on the video side.

So that’s a look at my first 18 hours of iOS, if you count 5 hours of sleep.  (me- not the gadgets)

Feel free to share any of your experiences with the upgrade, or any features you want me to test and document-  in the comments!