iOS 5 performance on iPad 1?

It really depends on what you are planing on doing with it....I gave my 1 to a buddy, and he runs IOS5 without issues...He uses his iPad for web surfing, and a little drawing...He is not a gamer, nor does he use Pages or Numbers.

Bottom line is that the 1 WILL run IOS5 though.

 

I bought a used iPad recently and upgraded it to IOS 5.1.1 and jailbroken. Seems fine. It's for my son to play games and watch kids stuff on youtube.

 

I'd say it performs adequately. It has noticeable lag when rendering web pages, but once everything loads it's good.

Switching between apps also takes a noticeable amount of time. Even closing them to go to the home screen sometimes lags.

That said, it's still a great piece of tech, and I'm sure your mum wouldn't mind receiving it as a gift.

 

It's a little bit slower in launching apps and such, but for most things, the iPad 1 works fine in iOS5. My gf had one before we upgraded, and it was working really well on it.

 

I still use my iPad first gen every single day multiple times a day. Pages runs great on it. Infinity Blade II is a little slow sometimes but it manages to play smoothly most of the time. Web sites are great. The general OS is also fine and smooth. Still waiting for a breakthrough feature(and a budget) to upgrade to a newer one.

 

For what I need from an iPad, my iPad 1st gen is great with iOS5. Web browsing, apps, pages, note apps, etc...Right as rain! I don't do heavy gaming, but I am positive the newer iPads will run the games smoother no doubt, but maybe your mom won't be playing heavy games either!

 

I think you should get the refurb iPad 2. The price difference for the base model is what, $20? It's absolutely worth the extra money for the increase in performance. And it'll be much more capable of running iOS 6 if interested when it comes out.