I upgraded my iPhone 4 today and the experience was the antithesis of the two days before on my iPad.  Everything went very smoothly and when finished everything that was supposed to be on the iPhone was there. I suspect that a few things played into the difference.  One, I had the experience of doing the iPad and was able to avoid some of the mis-steps.  Two, for some reason the issue of syncing with a different library did not come up – do not know why as the iPhone was also synced with my earlier Mac.  Third, and probably quite important, I suspect the volume of those hitting the Apple servers for the upgrade to iOS5 had decreased substantially.

First impressions of the new operating system are good.  Especially like the new tab layout in Safari on the iPad.  No more little icon with a number in it at the top left of the screen. There are actual labeled taba across the top!  Haven’t had a lot of time to test the other upgrades but will get to that in time.

Things do not get easier as I now have the challenge of upgrading my wife’s iPad and iPhone.  The big obstacle is that her iTunes library is on a PC – not a Mac – and also is not the one the devices were originally synced with.  I had fiddled with this a couple of months ago with little progress but will have to begin anew.  It seems there might be non-Apple programs that make this work so I will continue to investigate and let you know what I find. If anybody has ideas on how best to make this work, please let me know.