Heat seeker that I am, I upgraded the OS on my iPad to 4.2 today. I wasn’t hard over enough to try out the OS before Apple said it was ready, but I couldn’t wait to jump on the bandwagon. There were a few unsettling moments during the upgrade. The downloading and upgrading went fine, but the automatic backup that occurs after the upgrading apparently hung for about half an hour. At the end of that time iTunes announced that the backup had failed, and immediately started another one, which completed uneventfully.
You’d think that the first thing that you’d see upon starting up your newly upgraded iPad would be a list of new features and instructions on how to use them. You’d be wrong. Instead, I went on the web and found some pretty good third party instructions.
This is a very impressive upgrade. It’s most of what I hoped for when I bought the iPad in the first place. Although I am uninterested in the social media and games aspects of the upgrade, I find multitasking to be nearly essential, and the iOS 4.2’s implementation to be, considering the hardware limitations, spot on. Some were disappointed that Apple doesn’t allow third-party apps to run in the background, but I respect their decision to control the user experience, even as I am uncomfortable with the lack of a level playing field.
There are minor, but welcome, usability improvements, like the control panel to the left of the icons for running programs in the task manager (Apple doesn’t call it that).
iOS 4.2: about as close to a home run as I’ve seen in an OS upgrade. And the price is right.
My friend’s home computer is on the fritz. He brought his iPad over to do the upgrade on my MacBook Pro. But we were concerned about the automatic backup of his iPad onto my MacBook. Is there a way to do the upgrade without the backup?
Not that I know of. But iTunes is pretty smart about sorting out what to do when faced with lots of devices — after all, they want to make it easy for you to buy an iPhone, an iPod Tauch, and an iPad or two. I wouldn’t worry about the backup wiping out what’s already backed up from the devices you own yourself. If you want to make sure, after you’ve upgraded your friend’s iPad, you can back up your own.
I upgraded the iPad to iOS 4.2 3 days ago and the 3G was inoperable. After being on the phone with ATT and Apple many times the iPad had to be wiped clean and the system software redownloaded. The 3G is now working fine, but even though the iPad was synched with iTunes some data in Pages and other applications were lost. My wife is very upset at losing data. There are many posts on the Apple site about inoperable 3G after the upgrade, and I think this software needed to be tested more before release.
Dan, I’m sorry things didn’t go well for you. It does sound like, from your experience, that there are some bugs in the upgrade process.