Watching WWDC on Monday, I was impressed with a few features that iOS 5 introduced such as iCloud, Notification Center, PC Free, the thumb keyboard, multi touch swipe gestures to move between apps, and more. Other than that, I felt the presentation was dragging on with other features not worth mentioning in the presentation. Or maybe was it because instead of viewing it live, we have to watch a live stream of images from places such as Engadget?

Anyways, as I was watching I realized registered developers could get some hot piece of the action before waiting for the official release in Fall. You also don’t need to worry because once the official release comes out, you can update from your beta version to the official version without having to restore. Below, I’ll show you how to install iOS 5 on your device if you are a developer.

First visit iOS Dev center and click on the iOS SDK Beta tab.

Head to the downloads section within that page and download the respective iOS 5 for your device as well as the latest version of iTunes 10.5 Beta for Mac. If you are on a PC, for some reason you have to search the internet for the iTunes Beta of Windows.

Once you have installed iTunes and extracted the respective firmware for your device, open up iTunes and plug in your device. Then by holding the OPTION key on a Mac and CONTROL on a PC (correct me if I’m wrong) press on Check for Updates. This will allow you to choose the firmware you downloaded. Simply choose the extracted file, and just wait.

For some reason, I couldn’t install it and had to use the restore option. I just made sure I backed up my device before doing so. I know, it wasn’t that great restoring, but iOS5 was worth it.

If for some reason you are trying to put iOS 5 on a new device, make sure you add it to your list of devices in the iOS Provisioning Portal within the iOS Dev center.

In order to find the UDID of your device, you can find it in the Organizer within XCode.

So there you have it! The only problem I encountered was that I had to restore but other than that, everything went smooth. I’m loving iOS 5 so far and I plan on putting up my impressions after a few more days of playing around with it. I would do it sooner but I’m currently wrapping up a final project for my Spring Quarter here at UCLA.