Many of you will have heard that Apple announced the rollout of its latest mobile operating system, iOS 5.1, on Wednesday at the new iPad announcement. We know that many of you will have already successfully updated your device but it also seems that the iOS 5.1 update is causing problems for many people, us included.
We’ve already given news on a jailbreak for iOS 5.1 for those who like to tinker with their devices, but what if you can’t get the update anyway? I use an iPhone 4S and my partner has an iPhone 4 and neither of us has been able to update iOS 5.1 yet and have exactly the same error message coming up on our devices. We do know though that some colleagues have had no issues at all and are already using the update quite happily.
When attempting to update to 5.1 a message comes up that reads, ‘unable to check for update, an error occurred while checking for a software update.’ We’ve been trying many times over the last two days and still no joy. Although we realize that millions of people will be attempting the download at the same time, the fact that we have tried to update so many times is pretty frustrating. In fact we now know that this is also happening for plenty of other iOS device owners, as per an ongoing discussion on the Apple Support Communities.
Looking through the many messages it seems that plenty of owners are having the same problem as us across all iOS devices. Some have managed to update one of their devices but not another and it seems that other people on attempting the update say that their devices try to connect with the server and then a message comes up that says ‘software update failed’ or ‘no network connection.’ Another thread on the MacRumors forum also discusses the same issues with the update to iOS 5.1.
We’re interested to find out how widespread this problem is and would like to hear from anyone who is having issues? Are you becoming increasingly frustrated? Maybe you have some suggestions for what could be wrong or how to resolve the problem? Let us know by sending your comments.