Apple's iOS 5, released last Wednesday, is an impressive new rev of the OS for iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch, but it's off to a rocky start technically. Reports in discussion forums around the web are full of reports with problems updating devices to iOS 5.

Nathan Olivarez-Giles of the LA Times summed it up in the headline, "Apple's iOS 5 is the best iOS so far, once you get it installed." He said:

In the video below, my colleague Michelle Maltais and I talk about what a buggy and cumbersome pain it was to install iOS 5 and even get iCloud up an running this week.

Not exactly the type of ringing endorsement that makes you want to run out and update your department's stock of iPhones.

CNET's Lance Whitney had a confidence-building headline "iOS 5 update bricked my iPod Touch." He describes the kind of upgrade experience that Mac users believe that Windows users have, but not the kind of thing you expect from a phone of phone-like device:

An attempted upgrade to iOS 5 bricked my iPod Touch, forcing me to spend hours restoring the device....The upgrade to iOS 5 started smoothly enough on my end as iTunes seemed to be chugging along updating my device. But about halfway through, an error message popped up, and the process was aborted. When I checked my iPod Touch all the data had been wiped out, and iTunes refused to recognize the device.

David Morgenstern of ZDnet described another issue in his blog post, "With iOS 5 and iCloud, more memory is better than less for your iPhone, iPad." He says:

The common wisdom is that the arrival of iCloud and iOS 5 will let us store our stuff on the cloud and buy an iPhone and iPad with less memory. However, a recent developer blog post warns that more memory is the better choice.

The gist here is that iOS 5, particularly with iCloud does more caching, which takes up more memory than might be used to actually store the content on the device.

Macworld was a lone voice of optimism. On Friday, Lex Friedman posted a piece called "iOS 5 installation woes waning." He writes:

Untold hordes of iOS device owners rushed to upgrade their devices to iOS 5 upon its release ealier this week. Many did so and immediately began enjoying the fruits of Apple's latest incarnation of its mobile operating system. Others, however, were stymied by installation woes that prevented them from upgrading successfully. Macworld has found a simple, if not necessarily earth-shattering fix:

Try again now.

Though Apple's not saying so publicly, it appears that a few tweaks have been made on the company's end to the online elements of the installation process. Folks who suffered through various iOS 5 installation woes earlier in the week are able to complete the upgrade now.

For myself, I'm holding off updating my iPod touch. I don't need a brick.