iOS 5 goes live, some technical hitches encountered

Late yesterday, Apple loosed iOS 5 on the world ahead of the launch of the iPhone 4S tomorrow.

The 4S will, of course, come with iOS 5 on board, but yesterday all those iPhone 3 and 4 owners got a chance to download it.

And there were lots of them, which led to some problems. As word of the release spread virally around social networks, more and more customers piled on to download the upgrade, and predictably enough, many found themselves having trouble connecting.

Indeed, many encountered – and complained about – an “Error 3200” message, a code which apparently represents a failure to connect with the server. Those who did connect were generally treated to very slow download speeds.

All of this was an issue of intense demand, and the simple cure for Error 3200 was basically just to keep trying to snag the download. Or just sit back, relax and wait for today to download iOS 5, which is quite possibly what some folks did.

Although the majority didn’t have any trouble beyond some minor patience trying, some unlucky iPhone owners saw their devices bricked.

On the Apple support forums there are a small number of such complaints of phones getting stuck in recovery mode after a failed attempt to update.

It may well pay to just wait for the initial flurry of downloads to die down on major updates such as this.

iOS 5 makes around 200 tweaks to the operating system and involves a few major introductions.

These include a new messaging service – iMessage – which many BlackBerry owners might well be eyeing after this week of turmoil for Rim, along with integration of iCloud, Apple’s cloud storage facility.