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You need to extract the IPSW from the DMG file. It's easy though. On Windows I used a trial of "TransMac". You won't lose anything. Everything is backed up prior to the upgrade, including texts, contacts, etc.

Sorry I didn't get a chance to reply last night. I'll be doing this on my mac, so is it different to do then on windows?

Here are my impressions so far on iOS 5 GM -

iPhone 4 -

  • Performance wise it is about the same
  • Really like how you can go completely PC-less now
  • Don't like how if you want to go completely PC-less and do iCloud backups you will probably need to buy more storage on iCloud
  • Like that WiFi syncing with iTunes is an option
  • New notifications system is of course the best thing about the update. I can now tolerate Facebook notifications
  • Impressed by the amount of new options tucked away in Settings. It is almost to the point where they might need to consider a "basic user" and "advanced" options as I see a lot of non-technical users being overwhelmed.
  • Really like the amount of customization that can be done with notifications
  • Really like how I can have email message notifications on the lock screen. Now when I hear that I have a new email I can quickly glance to see if it is worth checking or not...very nice
  • Being a current MobileMe user, iCloud was kind of confusing. Right now they are setup as separate accounts because there when I tried to migrate my MobileMe account iOS told me to goto the website to do it, and there were no options there.
  • Once iCloud was setup it was fairly straight forward. I was able to login with my account on www.icloud.com (despite not being a dev) and the interface does look more polished than the MobileMe one (slightly). My only irk here was that there were no interfaces to get to my Photo Stream (or any photos) or Reminders. Hopefully we will see that next week.
  • Photo Stream worked as expected. Photos take a few minutes to appear. Wish there were an option to push a photo to a photo stream w/o being on WiFi but I understand the constraint with limited data plans these days.
  • There doesn't seem to be any iDisk with iCloud which is unfortunate... I hope they don't completely axe the feature. The iDisk web UI for MobileMe is quite good and I prefer its features over other services like DropBox.
  • iPod app is no more and has been replaced with an app entitled "Music" (which looks pretty much identical) and "Videos" (which mimics the iPad app by the same name). Not crazy about the Music icon.
  • iMessages make me yawn. Couldn't connect both my iPad and my iPhone to the same account (when I tried it said the account was already in use). Didn't they make a big deal about being able to carry on conversations from your iPhone to your iPad in some seamless fashion? Anyway, the utility of having an iMessage functionality is fairly marginal (you basically get "delivered" notification and thats about the only thing I can tell is new). The functionality is non-existent with the vast majority of my friends who don't use iOS. If an iMessage is sent to another iPhone does it still use one of my cell provider's plan SMS messages? This is unclear.
  • The Reminders app is actually pretty cool for the simple fact that it syncs with Exchange. Finally I can take full advantage of the Tasks feature in Outlook at work.

iPad -

  • Same niceties observed on the iPhone were present here.
  • Disappointed that the Messages app will only do iMessages and have no SMS features. It was expected, but I was still hoping for something better. It baffles me that there still this disconnection between Apple devices. I should be able to tap on a phone number on my iPad or Mac and it use my iPhone to place the call for instance. Microsoft was doing this with Outlook and business phones through standardized "telephony api" for years now...
  • The new split keyboard is really really nice and solves my biggest complaint about iPad which was the awkwardness of the large keyboard (especially in landscape mode). The only thing I dislike is that in Safari (and in some modes) it is not transparent between the two halves of the keyboard but there doesn't seem to be a good reason for this. At first i thought it was a bug, and tried rebooting my device to clear it... nope it is by design apparently. Hmmm...
  • The tab browsing is OK. It doesn't hang the moon for me. In some ways I wish there were an option to go back because the new tabs take up precious screen realestate. An autohide would be nice or have it only available from the top of the current page like how the iPhone's version of Safari hides the address bar as you scroll down the page.

  • Like 2

Will iPhone 4 owners be able to use Siri or is this just for 4s owners?

Forget it. Found the answer on this thread...this blows.why are they leaving it out of the 4? Because of hardware restrictions?

Officially I would expect them to say that the iPhone 4 hardware is incapable of using Siri at an acceptable speed. But then why isn't it included with iPad 2 then?

So what we are left with is that they probably want to use it as a selling point for their new iPhone. It is lame, but I can't blame them. You get what you pay for at the time that you pay for it. Anything that is added later is just icing on the cake. I'm glad Apple has updated iOS to include new features since I originally purchased my iPhone. I am disappointed that they didn't include Siri but am not angry about it.

Theoretically it's possible... but it would be first to do so. If it does, you'll be able to upgrade anyway to the actual release.

My problem with the GM... the SMS inbox limit seems to have gotten much more strict. I had over 79,000 texts in my inbox (over 3 years... since my iPhone 3G!!!) and when I restored my backup it said my sms mailbox was full. I couldn't receive any more texts until i'd deleted some - all the ones from the gf sorted it ;)

I read on a Dutch website that the current GM has a time bomb in it and will stop working after a certain date. While I'm finding this hard to believe can any of you confirm that this isn't the case?

It comes down to how strictly Apple interprets what GM really means. Ultimately, the purpose of a GM is to make sure there aren't any show-stopping bugs before the release. If the GM code base =/= the final release code base (even in small ways), there may be no show stopping GM bugs but there could be some bugs in the final release. For example, lets say there is a time bomb in the GM release and there are no show-stopping bugs, perhaps then removing this "time bomb" code from the GM will introduce a show-stopping bug in the final release. So based on that, I find it unlikely. They need to test the final code out before releasing it to the public.

Officially I would expect them to say that the iPhone 4 hardware is incapable of using Siri at an acceptable speed. But then why isn't it included with iPad 2 then?

Rumor is that the A5 in the iPhone 4S has 1GB of RAM, and that the Siri feature is quite memory intensive. The A5 in the iPad 2 only has 512MB of RAM.

We'll know for sure once iFixit gets ahold of a 4S.

Also I wanted to note that the camera app on my iPhone 4 seems to load a lot more quickly. It has seemed really slow to initialize the camera in the past. The lock screen camera button and volume button to take a picture are both really welcome.

Downloaded and installed. At home today, my iPhone 3GS lasted me for 2 hours when it usually lasts me for 10-12 hours. I have iCloud enabled, WiFi, 3G bluetooth, and Wifi Sync enabled (but my phone was perfectly synced and my iMac was shut down). It’s not jailbroken. Ideas?

It did that with Beta 7 and in fact it was downloading a bunch of data in the background. Like 400 MB in under two days on the 3G network… I had to reinstall beta 5 to avoid paying my phone bill too much… Sorry, but it’s a huge showstopper IMO bug that’ll make many people pay the price.

Downloaded and installed. At home today, my iPhone 3GS lasted me for 2 hours when it usually lasts me for 10-12 hours. I have iCloud enabled, WiFi, 3G bluetooth, and Wifi Sync enabled (but my phone was perfectly synced and my iMac was shut down). It’s not jailbroken. Ideas?

It did that with Beta 7 and in fact it was downloading a bunch of data in the background. Like 400 MB in under two days on the 3G network… I had to reinstall beta 5 to avoid paying my phone bill too much… Sorry, but it’s a huge showstopper IMO bug that’ll make many people pay the price.

It has to do with iCloud. I just shut it down and things seem to be in control again.

But iCloud just syncs/backups your data when you're on WiFi, doesn't it?

Well one would have thought yes… but by default, they turn on the backups even if you’re not connected to Wifi (or maybe it’s because I’ve been testing this in the past? but I doubt it…). I haven’t had much enabled, except for Contacts, Calendar, Locate my iPhone, and Reminders. No Documents, no Emails, no Pictures (no big stuff in the end). I turned it off now because my last phone bill was higher than expected - because of this specifically. It was syncing an incredibly large amount of void data through the 3G network.

What should I do ? Maybe if I destroy my iCloud account and create a new one? Maybe it’s because I’ve been testing the betas and it’s now corrupted?

This topic is now closed to further replies.
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