To understate the obvious, the iOS 5 upgrade must have been a huge undertaking for Apple VP Scott Forstall and his hardworking crew. They are to be congratulated for carefully crafting a useful set of changes and feature improvements and yet keep performance of your Apple mobile gadget at a high level.

Yes, I did encounter some glitches in performing the upgrade on an iPad 2 on Wednesday, but, after all is said and done, it appears Apple’s servers just weren’t ready to handle the load. That’s something hard to predict, and difficult to scale for, so I’ll cut Apple some slack. It’s not as if Amazon, Google, and certainly Research In Motion, are free of server problems.

I also have iOS 5 also running on a GSM iPhone 4, where the upgrade went smoothly. Just as a quick test, I worked on a friend’s iPhone 4s and, despite claims of stellar performance boosts, only sensed a modest improvement in launching apps, navigating through apps, and getting online. Then again, the friend has a Verizon Wireless account, which may account for Internet speeds that do not task the device’s limits.

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This article was posted on Monday, October 17th, 2011 at 12:00 AM and is filed under News and tagged with: Apple, Gsm, iOS 5, iPad 2, Iphone, iPhone 4, iPhone 4S, Research In Motion, Scott Forstall, smartphones, Verizon Wireless.