Today, Sept. 19, was the day the iOS 6 upgrade became available to owners of the iPhone 4 and the iPhone 4S. At about 10 a.m. PST I checked and there it was, both on my iPhone 4S and in iTunes.

As you'll see in the pages to come, my upgrade did not go completely smoothly. In fact, there is a serious problem that I haven't been able to solve yet having to do with my home Wi-Fi.

I haven't spent a lot of time yet with iOS 6. The only feature I gave more than a cursory glance is the new Maps app, and I'm mostly disturbed by what I see. Apple, you might recall, dropped Google Maps, which it had been using, and in iOS 6 switched to its own maps and app, based on data from TomTom and other sources.

Stupidly, I first tried to update to iOS 6 over the air to my phone. I gave up after watching the download indicator jump around from one hour to two hours to no guess at all. Back home, I checked iTunes on my Mac with a wired network connection and the update took seven minutes to download. There followed another five to 10 minutes of verifications and transferring data to the phone, but it was pretty fast overall.

Eventually my phone restarted and displayed the iOS 6 screen seen here.