Here at PC Pro, we try and do things so that you don’t have to. That’s why we’ve spent a good part of the weekend installing iOS on as many different Apple devices as we could lay our hands on. Although judging by the comments on our Twitter feed and earlier story about iOS 5 problems, many of you haven’t hung around to find out how we got on…

Our experience should help guide people who have yet to click the magic button in iTunes. And even if you’ve already downloaded iOS 5 onto your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch, some of the problems and workarounds we’ve discovered will still be of interest.

Here’s what we’ve found:

INSTALLATION TIMES AND ISSUES

David Bayon’s iPhone 4 – David Bayon’s iPhone 4 was the first to get the iOS 5 treatment on the night of release. The download was quick, the upgrade process itself worked first time and the phone was up and running in iOS 5 in little more than an hour. However, as he was switching to a new Mac, he expectedly lost all of his music and apps – or almost all of them. For some reason the upgrader decided to keep 35 seemingly randomly selected apps on the phone; the rest had to be re-downloaded. That process added an extra hour to the total upgrade time, and that’s without restoring the music collection

The office iPad 2 – The office iPad 2 was upgraded on Friday morning, once the crush of Thursday night’s launch had died down a little. The whole update process took a little over an hour, and (despite a barrage of error messages) worked flawlessly. However, it should be noted that we changed the PC that the iPad was synched with shortly before the upgrade, and despite iTunes assuring us that a full backup had been taken, all of our apps and settings were lost during the upgrade.

Barry Collins’ iPad 2 – Our second attempt at installing iOS 5 was on Barry’s personal iPad 2. The whole process took just over two hours, more than double the time it took on the office iPad. This is partly due to an enforced iTunes upgrade, partly due to the use of a slower home broadband connection, and largely because the iOS 5 download stalled three quarters of the way through on the first attempt, forcing us to start from scratch. Someone at Apple should be fired for not including a decent download manager in iTunes. However, the whole process went smoothly and every single one of the dozen or so apps was restored with their data intact.

Barry Collins’ iPhone 3GS – The iPhone 3GS is the oldest iPhone hardware supported by iOS 5, and given that iOS 4 had certainly handicapped the performance of the 3GS, we weren’t overly optimistic about this. As with the iPad 2, the whole process took about two hours and the entire OS had to be downloaded afresh, as there are obvious differences between the tablet and smartphone OS. The upgrade went relatively smoothly, but although iTunes claimed it had restored all of the 82 apps on the 3GS, 30 or so were not reinstalled. That meant we had to manually re-download a number of apps, and lost all the settings and data (see problem apps below). However, the iPhone 3GS was definitely running much more smoothly after the iOS 5 upgrade, with none of the stutter that used to occur on the lock screen or when swishing between home screens. Battery life, however, is another issue, as you’ll see below…

PROBLEM APPS

Although the base OS largely appears to be working fine on all our devices (see battery issues below), there are a few apps that seem to be struggling with iOS 5.

The Facebook app – which was only recently updated – appears to be extremely slow and crash-prone on smartphones, with many people reporting that the app frequently crashes whenever you attempt to do post a comment or photo or during other basic task.

The excellent TomTom app was booted off Barry’s iPhone 3GS during the update to iOS 5. Although the app itself works fine when reinstalled, users are unable to restore paid-for services such as HD Traffic updates, which are critical to many users. Many people are reporting the issue on TomTom’s forums, and the company claims a fix is on the way, although it really should have dealt with the issue during the extended beta period – during which many people reported the problem.

Google Voice, which isn’t available in the UK anyway, has reportedly been pulled from the App Store because of crashes.

BATTERY DRAIN ISSUES

The most worrying issue with iOS 5 are the reports of rapid battery drain. Indeed, Barry’s iPhone 3GS went from 60% charged to empty in less than three hours yesterday, with the phone getting unusually warm in the process. Many other users are reporting similar issues on Twitter and tech forums, and it’s not confined to the ageing 3GS: owners of iPhone 4 and even the new 4S have reported poor battery life, not to mention iPad users.

It’s not clear what’s causing the batteries to deplete so quickly. The OS X Daily website has a list of the chief suspects, including Bluetooth, faulty location services and the new notifications menu.

On Barry’s iPhone 3GS, a faulty calendar entry had lodged itself in the new notifications centre,  which refused to shut and caused the notifications screen to flicker rapidly. Once calendar notifications had been switched off, the battery drain appeared to return to normal, but we can’t say for certain if this was the culprit.

Others have suggested that Apple’s new Find Friends app could be the guilty party, with frequent requests from friends to verify your location causing the power-sapping GPS chip to kick-in frequently.

We’ve only seen this problem on one of our four devices we’ve upgraded to iOS 5, but it’s certainly one that Apple must quickly get to grips with.

I got an Amazon Kindle for Christmas. I charged it for only the third time yesterday, despite using it almost every day. In fact, my only problem with the Kindle is remembering where I left the charger several weeks ago.

Similarly, I can’t remember the last time I ran out of juice on my laptop. Until a couple of years ago, I could barely complete a train journey home without peering at the Windows battery meter and praying the laptop didn’t abruptly conk out mid-way through a match in Football Manager (I do work on the train sometimes, in case my publisher is reading).

Yet, with the extended battery pack on my Dell XPS M1330, the battery lasts about three or four hours – plenty long enough to get me to and from the office. And by today’s standards, that’s even starting to look pretty feeble. The 13in MacBook Pro lasted for in excess of 10 hours in our light-use battery tests, for example. Like the Kindle, it’s practically reached the point where you barely need to worry about the battery.

I wish I could say the same for my smartphone. I’m about to head up to the Lake District for a photography weekend with some of the PC Pro crew. I’ve charged my iPhone overnight, but with a Bluetooth connection to the satnav and a seven hour drive ahead of me, I’m genuinely concerned that the phone’s battery might not even last all the way to Cumbria. And the last thing you want on a long car journey is to worry about whether the phone will still be alive to call the AA if the exhaust falls off.

I love the iPhone, but part of me also longs for the day when I could sling my Nokia E71 in my pocket and know that I wouldn’t even need to take a charger away with me for the weekend, let alone before we even get to our destination.

So here’s a pledge for Apple, Nokia, HTC and all the other smartphone makers out there: make a modern smartphone that can ease my battery paranoia, and I’ll be the first in the queue for one when my current contract runs out in the summer.

The Dexim P-Flip is a superbly designed extra battery cum desktop dock for the iPhone. When you’re at your desk, you plonk your iPhone into the P-Flip cradle and connect it to your computer via USB cable. This both synchronises your iPhone with the PC, and charges the P-Flip’s battery.

Then when you’re ready to head out into the big wide world, you flip the battery pack flat against the surface of the phone and benefit from up to eight hours of extra talktime or 15 more hours of video playback (Dexim’s figures, not mine).

What’s more, the device doubles as a stand for the iPhone (both upright and landscape), allowing you to watch video without having to awkwardly cradle the handset in your palm – although the screen might be a little too perpendicular to the surface to make for comfortable long-term viewing.  It’s reasonably good value too, costing £40 from Play.com.

The Regen ReNu might cost more up front, but it could help save on those iPhone power bills. It’s a  solar panel charger –admittedly about as much use a cat flap on a submarine in Britain’s current climate.

This elegant-looking panel needs about six hours of direct sunlight to fully replenish its charge, according to the company spokesman I chatted to in Las Vegas. It then takes another hour-and-a-half to charge up the iPhone – around about the same time it takes to top up the iPhone’s battery from an ordinary plug socket.

It might not be the most practical option in a British winter, but left on a windowsill all day during the spring and summer months, it could well provide enough juice for the daily charge, and its striking looks make it a conversation starter in more ways than one. The solar panel costs $199 from Regenliving.com, with the optional iPod Dock costing an extra $89.

There are many things I’ve learnt to distrust over the years. PRs who start a conversation with the phrase “have you got 30 seconds?”, my Dad’s woefully optimistic assessment of the carnage he’s unleashed on his PC, and West Ham’s back four, for instance. But none more so than the battery indicator on mobile phones.

They are pathological liars. They’ll spend two days displaying five full bars of battery goodness, only to chomp their way through the remaining bars in six-and-a-half minutes. I’ll never buy a Sony Ericsson phone again after the time I left the house with the full five bars of battery, only to end up on the motorway hard shoulder a couple of hours later, barking instructions to my girlfriend in a demented verbal shorthand, because the battery had inexplicably drained down to the last sodding bar.

And what does the phone do when it’s approaching battery Armageddon? Does it go into Apollo 13 mode and start shutting down every last unnecessary amp of power? No, it starts twittering out “battery low” warnings like a budgie on Speed, serving only to chip another few seconds off your remaining talktime in the process.

That is until the Nokia E71 arrived. You may be aware of others, but this is genuinely the first phone I’ve ever owned where the battery indicator actually indicates how much battery life is left. This became gloriously apparent on Friday night, when my train decided to take an unscheduled stop somewhere between Three Bridges and Haywards Heath. For an hour-and-a-chuffing-half.

The train driver is probably right now being head-hunted by the SAS, because if this chap was dropped behind enemy lines and taken prisoner, there’s no amount of nipple-tweaking torture that could persuade him to start talking. Thus, I headed over to the BBC Travel website to find out what the problem was, and then sent a succession of SMS progress reports to my girlfriend, all with my battery indicator dangling on a single precarious bar.

I even managed to fire up the GPS and find out exactly where I was marooned, and read a few angry comments on Twitter from fellow commuters. Indeed, the phone was still perky when I arrived home some three hours later.

So battery indiciators have stopped lying to us. Perhaps, Microsoft can headhunt the person responsible and set them to work on Windows’ progress bars? 

Well, take a look at pictures of the U200 Tosh. It has overhung screen hinges – by which I mean, when the screen is opened any further than about 50 degrees, the base of the screen starts to drop over the back of the laptop. By the time it is open at a sensible laptop viewing angle, the screen base is aligned with the bottom of the main body of the unit, and completely obscures the rear of the laptop. That’s why all the plugs are on the sides and even the front: the back is completely occupied by the battery.

So… why is someone selling this? – at first blush it looks like a jolly good idea. Extended battery runtime is an excellent concept, and hanging outside the form-factor of a laptop is a tried and tested way to get it. Having a standard battery dock in many models of laptop no doubt helps manufacturers keep prices down, too – but as with so much “should be easy” stuff on the web, it looks like this is one of those howlers it’s all too easy to get caught by.

I actually sat here for a few minutes, waggling the screen of the Tosh to and fro for a while, trying to figure out if the lid could possibly miss the bump on the back of the battery – then I realised it was much easier to confess to moral turpitude here and wait for someone to recommend a battery replacement website which actually knows what they are selling.

(by the way, no special criticism is intended for laptopbatterystore.co.uk – they are just one of the hundreds of sites all apparently using the same copatibility parts matrix to offer the same batteries for the same laptops)

It’s not just that the iPhone actually makes the internet pretty usable on a pocket device. That’s certainly a big part of the formula; but for me, the coup de grâce is that, in the UK at least, it comes with a simple, standard unlimited data package.

That means you don’t need to ration your mobile internet usage. You can use the web the same way you use it at home – for looking around, for trying things out, for exploring. For browsing.

Pence per megabyte

Of course, you can do that with any old phone if you want to: but until recently, it’s been a pricey proposition. With my old Orange contract I paid £10 a month – around a quarter of my total bill – for ten megabytes of data transfer. Ten megabytes a month! Just the front page of Slashdot comes to over 500K.

And, naturally, if I ever used more than that, the price went up even further. Since there’s no easy way to tell how much data you’ve actually consumed at any given point – nor to predict how heavy a page will be until it arrives – I kept my mobile internet use to a bare minimum. (The barely-usable interfaces of most smartphones and mobile browsers played a part too.)

To be fair, not all data plans are as poor as mine was. T-Mobile, for example, offers a range of 1GB-per-month tariffs at quite reasonable prices. And Orange was always trying to persuade me to buy into various deals which would give me better value if I regularly used the net at certain times of day (and worse value if I didn’t).

But I’m not going to change providers just to get cheaper mobile internet access, especially not via the same old clunky devices. Nor am I interested in trying to calculate which mobile internet package best matches my highly sporadic usage.

And if I find that sort of thing too tedious to bother with, I’m pretty sure the man in the street will too.

So I think O2 has got it absolutely right by distilling the iPhone into a very simple proposition: “this is the world’s most usable mobile internet device, and you can use it as much as you like for one flat rate.” That’s an easy message to understand, and the price is pretty competitive too. Just what’s needed to coax smartphone skeptics onto the mobile browsing bandwagon.

Sucking up juice in the pub

For my own part, I was certainly excited about being free to browse without worrying about the bill. I pictured myself using Google to settle even the most trivial arguments in seconds. I imagined myself chatting to friends online just to while away long train journeys. Hell, if I ended up in a ropey pub, I could use the web to find a better one while finishing up my pint. And now I have my iPhone, I can indeed do all of these things.

Unfortunately, what I hadn’t realised is that doing so hammers your battery. I learnt that on my first day with the iPhone, which I largely spent trying out online resources: downloading things from the App Store, browsing Facebook as I walked down the street and marvelling at how the built-in YouTube application, coupled with a pretty decent speaker, turns the iPhone into a free video jukebox.

Within a few hours my battery was almost empty.

You can safely skip this digression

Now, I’m pretty old – or so our staff writers tell me – and I’ve had a lot of mobile phones in my time. But I particularly remember my first phone (a Motorola mr20), which I bought twelve years ago, because it had a standby battery life of around ten hours. And that caused a degree of trauma it’s hard to forget.

With such a short battery life, the thing needed charging every single night. If I ever ended up away from home for the night (hey, it happened), or simply forgot to put it on to charge before stumbling into bed (which admittedly happened more often), I’d be left incommunicado the next day.

Indeed, if someone called me in the morning, I’d always try to cut the call short. Otherwise, the strain on my battery could have caused it to expire before the evening. And then, who knows, I might have ended up missing out on the social event of the season.

Eventually, I upgraded to a Nokia 6130, which lasted for a good three or four days between charges, even when I’d been using it to – shock, horror – make phone calls. My phone-related anxieties evaporated. It was like a weight lifting from my shoulders.

iPhone better than phone from 1996

The iPhone 3G’s battery life isn’t stunning, but it’s nowhere near as bad as my old Motorola. It’s too soon to gauge properly, but it looks like it’ll happily stay on standby for at least three days. My alarming first-day experience arose from abnormally intensive use, which I’ll probably never repeat.

But nevertheless, it’s rekindled my long-dormant battery angst. I can indeed now sit on a train and chat with my friends – but will I still have a usable phone by the time I get to my destination? And yes, I can use Google to find a better pub, but will I be able to call my girlfriend to tell her where it is?

And so I find myself opening Safari with just as much trepidation as I used to open the browsers on my previous phones. The iPhone has delivered me from the fear of running up a huge bill, but in its place has come an equal fear of running down my battery.

For sure, overall the iPhone is still a great stride forward. But, alas, I’ve found that stride comes at a cost of… let’s say half a step back.

For the past week I’ve been trying out this tiny wind turbine called the HYmini. The fan charges up an internal battery which can power any gadget that connects to its USB port.

I’ve mounted this one on the handlebars of my bike, and my 12-mile commute so far seems to be enough to power my mobile phone. The only downside is that I have to explain what it is to inquisitive cyclists at every red traffic light.

As well as this, the PC Pro offices are currently stuffed full of solar panels, wind-up chargers and various battery packs. It’s all research for a feature coming up in the next issue, which asks if it’s possible to power all of your gadgets with sustainable energy. Check out issue 165 for the answer.

Top Tip: If you ever have to design a “green” gadget, why not make it an attractive colour? Green green products are a cliché.