I updated my iPad from iOS 5.1 to iOS 6.0 yesterday.

 

I chose what was very probably the worst time to download the update - i.e. at the time of day in Finland where both the West and the East Coast of the US were awake and just about at the office.

 

This wasn't really my choice. Having decided that I might as well do it as now I had no fresh magazine or newspaper on the iPad that I hadn't read, I then found out that the upgrade required a free 2.2GB on the iPad.

 

Now I have an iPad 2 with the minimum 16GB due to the fact that when I bought it I had no idea whether I would use it much or not and so abandoned the usual rule of getting the biggest hard drive (or equivalent) version if you can't upgrade the hard drive. I was already paying getting on for 500 Euros (which at the time was almost 750 dollars) for the Wi-Fi Only 16GB iPad 2 so the idea of paying another 200 Euros (then 300 USD) to move up to 64GB didn't appeal given that I wasn't even sure if I would use it for more than just reading a few newspapers/magazines.

 

Needless to say people like me with a 16GB model - even of the iPad2, anyone who buys an iPad3 with 16GB wants their head examining - are continually getting close to running out of space and their back issues of magazines (even the good ones) are continually deleted and are thus only available by re-downloading them (at no cost though).

 

So I had a massive (I often have less) 1.4 GB and needed to start deleting stuff. Hence the delay until the US had woken up until I finally reached 2.3GB (I've been here before - 2.2GB might well be 100MB too little ...) and could start the update.

 

So, plug the iPad into the mains and just ignore the thing for a long time.

 

The first time I looked it seemed to be stuck on having downloaded 0.01 % (i.e. the usual line marking how much had already been downloaded was there but didn't seem to have moved from zero) but the next time I looked it had finished and wanted me to log in to set up a couple of things.

 

So that was that. I was so quick that certainly my "overnight will be necessary" wasn't true and it probably actually took something like 60-90 mins (depending on how long it had been finished when I looked that second time).

 

So that was positive.

 

There was also a few (extremely minor, though) improvements in the UI.

 

For instance when you open a PDF (.epub, etc.) file from an e-mail you now have a large pop-up  with icons asking you which app to use to open it (iBooks for instance) that replaces the old iBooks + More that you used to see at the top-right of the screen.

 

A similar small improvement I'll add in here when I remember what it was (!) - clearly it was not particularly memorable.

 

But then there are a couple of big negatives.

 

Firstly there is no longer a standard YouTube app so you need to open YouTube in Safari before doing a search on something you have just read about in a newspaper/magazine article. (I often search on stand-up comedians as these are mentioned in the What's On section of the UK newspaper "the i" which I get for ca 15 Euros for 3 months on subscription.)

 

But the biggy - as most of you probably already know - is the replacement of Google Maps with Apple Maps. In time maybe these will be better than Google maps through their vectoring techniques but for the moment they are gruesome.

 

In US podcasts I've heard complaints about the coverage outside the major municipal areas, well I live in the capital city area of Finland (which as major a municipal area as you can get here) and the maps are as ugly as sin and almost as useless.

 

So the total so far is

 

Upgrade: Positive experience

 

Functions: 2 extremely minor plusses; one barely acceptable anti-Google measure (YouTube) and one completely unacceptable anti-Google measure (Maps).

 

Two stars maybe if it were an Amazon book.