Micro-review of iOS 5: Stability has left the building

iOS 5 is an incredibly mixed bag of awesome and glitchy, but the worst news — eclipsing everything else in significance — is that it’s just not stable.

(Many people will tell me that they aren’t having any problems. Happy to hear it. I’m totally jealous.)

My iPhone and iPad used to be so reliable and efficient that I’d forget they were computers — and that was the soul of iOS (more than multitouch). But the feature arms race has had a terrible cost: we finally have decent notifications and many other lovely goodies, but I also find iOS 5 to be really flaky and just stupidly power hungry. I have the battery problem in spades — try 50% in an hour this morning, running only the timer — which is more irritating than a grain of sand in my mouth. Hangs and crashes happen: not a great deal, but they used to be virtually unheard of. And it’s a bit balky, even on my blazing fast iPhone 4S. And on an an older device … there have been several moments when I truly regretted installing it on my iPad 1.

All quite saddening.