How To Update Your iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch To iOS 5

iOS 5 is due to be released to the public Wednesday and we know you Apple fans out there are chomping at the bit to update your iDevice to the latest version of the operating system. Below we've posted a quick easy how to that we hope makes the process of upgrading as painless and easy as possible.

Keep in mind iOS 5 only works with the iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS, iPad and iPod Touch, it won't work on legacy devices

1. For starters you'll need to update to iTunes 10.5 which was made officially available to the public Tuesday afternoon. If you haven't grabbed it yet you can get it here.
2. Plug your current iPhone iPad, or iPod Touch into your computer and launch iTunes. Your phone should start to sync and backup automatically. If it doesn’t start to sync automatically, click the Sync button in order to back up your device. Note: You should always make a back-up before updating!
3. iTunes may prompt you that a software update is available. If it does just click update if it doesn’t click "Check for Update" under the version section.
4. iOS 5 should automatically start to download and then install. Your iDevice will restart, don’t panic. Let iTunes do it’s thing and complete the update process.
5. Once your update is completed iTunes should prompt you to do one of two things – set your device up as a new device or restore ir from a backup. If you want to keep all your old info, apps ect choose to restore from a backup and select the backup you should have just made.
6. Once the restore is done your device will reboot. When iTunes detects it again it will start to sync back any apps and games your old iPhone had installed.

After you're all done with this initial manual update to iOS 5 you’ll have the option to use iCloud backups in the future as well as OTA updates so you’ll never have to fuss with cables and computers again.

Check for iOS Compatibility Issues
One thing many users fail to do is check to make sure their favorite apps, tools ect are going to be updated or compatible with new software. I strongly suggest you take the time and make a point of checking developers’ Web sites for any mission-critical apps you run to make sure they aren’t warning about any compatibility issues. If you find any issues with apps you simply can’t live without, I recommend delaying your iOS 5 upgrade until the developers release compatibility updates.

Jailbreakers!
The beta version of iOS 5 has already been jailbroken so we fully expect the iPhone Dev Team and ih8sn0w to have a jailbreak available for iOS 5 when it is actually released on Wednesday. This by no means confirms there will be one, I'm just speculating. There is no word on an untethered jailbreak as of yet. However, according to popular iPhone hacker @i0n1c (Stefan Esser), there is one in the works.