Yesterday’s iOS 5.0.1 update was the first iOS firmware update to be made available as an OTA (over the air) update. And it appears to have gone very well – at least from what I can gauge from my own results on three iOS devices, good results for all my colleagues at iSource.com, and reactions I’ve seen round the web so far.

I did the OTA update yesterday on the original iPad my wife and daughter share, my iPad 2, and my iPhone 4S. Each of them downloaded the update in 3-5 minutes and ran the install in 5-8 minutes.

OTA updates were seen to be working nicely in the later rounds of the iOS 5 betas, but it’s good to see the first one available to the general public go smoothly.

How was your iOS 5.0.1 update experience? Did you do the OTA update? If so, how did it go for you?

In iOS 5 the iPad’s Safari browser no longer shows a separate view with thumbnails for each page currently open, as it did in previous iOS versions. Instead Safari now uses tabbed browsing, which has been popular for some time on desktop browsers and even several alternative browsers for the iPad.

Judging by the comments on my first post about tabbed browsing in iOS 5, there are a number of you who hate this change in Safar, hate tabbed browsing.

I like tabbed browsing a lot. I‘m always running a crazy number of open tabs in Chrome on my MacBook Pro, and I generally have quite a few open on the iPad 2 as well.

So now I’m a little curious about how all of you feel about the change to tabbed browsing in Safari. Do you love it or hate it? Or not too fussed either way? Would you like to see an option to choose to turn tabbed browsing on or off? (I have no idea how viable or not that would be, but just for wish list sake here)

As several of you have mentioned in comments on some recent iOS 5 related posts here, the new basic photo editing features added to the Photos app in iOS 5 are not available on the original iPad.

My understanding is that the reason for this is said to be because the original iPad doesn’t have a camera.

If that is the reason, it seems a very weak one to me. The original iPad does not have a camera, no argument – but Apple is happy enough to sell a $30 accessory (the Camera Connection Kit) that serves to bring photos to the iPad.

So Apple knows that users want to get photos onto the iPad, and they’ve got an accessory that helps them do it – why not enable the basic photo editing features? This doesn’t strike me as an issue where there’s any hardware spec deficit on the original iPad.

Perhaps I’m missing an obvious and more valid reason for the lack of the photo editing features. If so, I hope one of you will point it out in the comments, because the ‘no camera’ reason doesn’t feel like it cuts it. Hopefully if that;s the only reason, then we might see the feature added in an iOS 5 update.

Just a few days back I posted asking where all the iOS 5 app updates were. Well, over the last couple days the iOS 5 updates for iPad apps have really started to flow.

I currently have around 200 apps installed on my iPad 2. This morning their were 28 updates available and the vast majority of them were at least partially to add iOS 5 support or features.

Today is iOS 5 release day, so obviously it’s good to see so many more updates coming along now.

With the release of iOS 5 coming in just a few days – on October 12 – I’m still not seeing a lot of iPad apps getting updates for the new OS version. I’ve seen a handful – most recently iA Writer and Evernote – and at one point thought the pace of updates was increasing, but lately not so much.

I’m basing this only on the updates I see for my own installed iPad apps (around 200 at the moment) and in RSS feeds for updated apps. Unless what I’m seeing is not representative at all of iPad apps as a whole, then there are very few apps that have been updated leading up to the iOS 5 release. 

So I’m wondering if this means the majority of apps don’t need updates, or the devs ares till working on them, or I there a backlog of updated apps under review by Apple. If you’re an iPad app developer and you have any thoughts or insight on this, I’d love to hear them in the comments.