As promised, Apple has released an update to iOS 5 that purports to fix bugs within the operating system that affected the battery life of its devices. The 5.0.1 update is relatively minor otherwise—in addition to the battery life bugs, Apple says it contains improved voice recognition for Aussies using Siri for dictation, adds multitasking gestures for the original iPad, and resolves bugs related to Documents in the Cloud.

Apple acknowledged the battery life bugs last week after numerous reports began popping up online from dissatisfied iPhone 4S owners. While the problem didn't seem to affect everyone who bought an iPhone 4S, a lengthy thread appeared on Apple's discussion forums from users who were getting much less life out of their iPhones than expected. Since then, there have been plenty of suggestions posted online for how to improve the situation, such as turning off location-based Reminders (which requires your phone to monitor your location more frequently), turning off Siri (or at least the "raise to speak" feature), turning off Bluetooth, and turning off push notifications.

When Apple acknowledged the problem, the company said that a "small number of customers have reported lower than expected battery life on iOS 5 devices. We have found a few bugs that are affecting battery life and we will release a software update to address those in a few weeks." Indeed, developers who had early access to iOS 5.0.1 reported on Twitter that their iPhone 4Ss did seem to squeeze a little more life out of their batteries after the update, and now that it's available to the public, we're about to find out on a larger scale whether that's true.

UPDATE: iOS 5.0.1 also has a few security fixes, according to Apple. Most specifically, it addresses the kernel flaw discovered by security researcher Charlie Miller that could allow apps to run unsigned code. Miller has recommended that all iOS device users install the update for this security fix.