I finally updated my iPad2 with iOS 5 – I say finally because it took a while to perform the actual update. I live on a MacBook Pro so I had to first get the iTunes 10.5 approx 60.9MB followed by an 888MB of Lion recovery update then followed by a 770MB of iOS 5 update – that’s almost 2GB of updates across my laptop and iPad2 – am ok with this as this would probably be the last time we all would need a computer to upgrade our iOS devices. With the advent of iCloud everything will now be “pushed” to your device from the cloud. Wireless syncing will now happen through the cloud. Essentially everything will go through the cloud. It’s super convenient to keep contacts, calendars and appointments in a centralized location but to me there is always something that had to be traded off for convenience in this case our privacy. It’s now in the cloud – Pray and continue believing that gods are looking over us from the cloud.
There are a few cool things that iOS 5 brings to the table – as you all know the most sought out feature is iMessage – it is truly remarkable – not because its revolutionary or new but only because it’s just there now for iOS devices.
BBM is to Blackberry whereas iMessage is to iPhone/iOS Devices. The beauty of this app is it serves as a communication channel across any iOS device with iOS 5 on it for free! (well it uses your data on your wireless or wi-fi).
This is how simple it is – open contacts and keyed in a contact with their cell # and email address and voila I’m good to go – I open iMessage, select the contact and start texting like crazy – OMG, ROFL or TMI no limits baby! here’s the icing – you can even send pics from iPhoto or snap a fresh one from the camera – you can send videos across too!. Remember that the “send read receipt” (in Settings) if turned on will let the other party know when you have read the message – could get you in trouble sometimes 
The other cool feature I like in this upgrade is the split keyboard. The keyboard can now be docked and split as you please both in landscape and the portrait mode. Super easy to type if you don’t have the plausible thumbs
Calendar is pretty much the same with minor UI changes. Reminders is OK too nothing out of the ordinary.
Notification center is a nice feature but I think it would be even cooler if they would have made the notifications and the drag down pane a little bigger on iPad (considering the screen real estate) – It looks and feels smaller on an iPad
Safari now has tabs that can be dragged one over the other – reader removes the clutter and there is a tweet button in the options next to the address bar.
Hmm.. so overall to me iMessage, split keyboard are the only notable features on iOS 5 for iPad/2
Wireless synching is only cool if you have multiple iOS devices. iCloud is convenient but am not sure how safe my data is (not referring to security here and also am sure they operate in very high resilient and high availability environments) – all I’m saying is before today I could still have my contacts and photos scattered across backups and HDDs – only drawback with this approach is data access could get cumbersome but my data is under my control – moving to the cloud saves me this hassle of sync but what else does it offer – privacy? – cloud computing is cost effective, ok I admit, very cost effective, for service providers but what does that mean to you as a consumer – especially when you are handing over the responsibility of safe keeping your data to the cloud owners – Paranoid am I? I heard from somewhere of news where a bunch of people made a list of “houses that can be robbed” just by collating data from Facebook public profiles – all they did was capture home addresses and mapped people who are not at their homes – remember when you use the check-in feature in FB based in your location – think about it
