You have probably heard about iOS 5 from the recent Apple’s WWDC keynote. It includes 200 new features – iMessage, Notification Center, twitter integration, Reminders, taking pictures with volume key, etc..
But you have to wait until Fall of 2011 to officially install iOS 5..
If you can’t wait, this is how you can update to iOS 5 beta.
Pre-requisite
There is only one, hard pre-requisite:
- You need to have your iPhone/iPad device activated with a iOS developer account
A iOS developer account can activate up to 100 devices for testing purposes. You can either spent $99 to register as an iOS developer, or find a developer willing to activate for you.
Then you have to:
- Install a UDID app on your iPhone/iPad, and use it to send your device info to the iOS developer. The developer will then add your device to his list.
Steps
The rest is easy.
- Fulfill the pre-requisite first!
- Register a free iOS developer so that you can download the beta (it’s free)
- Download the iOS 5 BETA for your device (link)
- Extract to get a IPSW
- Download and install iTunes 10.5 BETA (link)
- Connect your iPhone/iPad to your computer
- Open iTunes
- Press and hold the Option/alt key (Mac) or Shift key (Windows), and click Restore
- Select the extracted IPSW
- Restore!
Pitfalls
Some possible pitfalls:
- If you encountered this error during restore “this device isn’t eligible for the requested build”, try editing your host file.
- Still doesn’t work, try restarting in DFU mode.