the last word

Photography meets digital computer technology. Photography wins -- most of the time.

  • site home
  • blog home
  • galleries
  • contact
  • underwater
  • the bleeding edge
You are here: Home / The Bleeding Edge / iOS 4.2 on the iPad

iOS 4.2 on the iPad

November 22, 2010 By JimK 4 Comments

iOS 4.2 on the iPad
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 up your day came for about half an hour. At the end of that time iTunes announced that the backup and 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.

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.

← Road trip Selling prints by the square inch →

Comments

  1. Harlan Harrison says

    November 25, 2010 at 10:03 am

    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?

    Reply
  2. Jim says

    November 25, 2010 at 11:35 am

    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.

    Reply
  3. Dan says

    December 1, 2010 at 7:20 am

    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.

    Reply
  4. Jim says

    December 1, 2010 at 10:27 am

    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.

    Reply

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

January 2021
S M T W T F S
 12
3456789
10111213141516
17181920212223
24252627282930
31  
« Dec    

Articles

  • About
    • Patents and papers about color
    • Who am I?
  • How to…
    • Backing up photographic images
    • How to change email providers
  • Lens screening testing
    • Equipment and Software
    • Examples
      • Bad and OK 200-600 at 600
      • Excellent 180-400 zoom
      • Fair 14-30mm zoom
      • Good 100-200 mm MF zoom
      • Good 100-400 zoom
      • Good 100mm lens on P1 P45+
      • Good 120mm MF lens
      • Good 18mm FF lens
      • Good 24-105 mm FF lens
      • Good 24-70 FF zoom
      • Good 35 mm FF lens
      • Good 60 mm lens on IQ3-100
      • Good 63 mm MF lens
      • Good 65 mm FF lens
      • Good 85 mm FF lens
      • Good and bad 25mm FF lenses
      • Good zoom at 24 mm
      • Marginal 18mm lens
      • Marginal 35mm FF lens
      • Mildly problematic 55 mm FF lens
      • OK 16-35mm zoom
      • OK 60mm lens on P1 P45+
      • OK Sony 600mm f/4
      • Pretty good 16-35 FF zoom
      • Pretty good 90mm FF lens
      • Problematic 400 mm FF lens
      • Tilted 20 mm f/1.8 FF lens
      • Tilted 30 mm MF lens
      • Tilted 50 mm FF lens
      • Two 15mm FF lenses
    • Found a problem – now what?
    • Goals for this test
    • Minimum target distances
      • MFT
      • APS-C
      • Full frame
      • Small medium format
    • Printable Siemens Star targets
    • Target size on sensor
      • MFT
      • APS-C
      • Full frame
      • Small medium format
    • Test instructions — postproduction
    • Test instructions — reading the images
    • Test instructions – capture
    • Theory of the test
    • What’s wrong with conventional lens screening?
  • Previsualization heresy
  • Privacy Policy
  • Recommended photographic web sites
  • Using in-camera histograms for ETTR
    • Acknowledgments
    • Why ETTR?
    • Normal in-camera histograms
    • Image processing for in-camera histograms
    • Making the in-camera histogram closely represent the raw histogram
    • Shortcuts to UniWB
    • Preparing for monitor-based UniWB
    • A one-step UniWB procedure
    • The math behind the one-step method
    • Iteration using Newton’s Method

Category List

Recent Comments

  • Robert Frangioso on Leica 280/4 Apo-Telyt R on GFX 50R in infrared
  • Robert Frangioso on Why so few posts?
  • Ken on Noise reduction and downsampling
  • Robert Kuechle on Chronography video up
  • JimK on Leica 90/2 Apo-Summicron ASPH-M on GFX 50S
  • DanB on Leica 90/2 Apo-Summicron ASPH-M on GFX 50S
  • gideon on How fast is the Sony a7RIV silent shutter?
  • JimK on How fast is the Sony a7RIV silent shutter?
  • Gideon on How fast is the Sony a7RIV silent shutter?
  • JimK on How fast is the Sony a7RIV silent shutter?

Archives

Unless otherwise noted, all images copyright Jim Kasson.