It took a weekend for 100 million users of Apple mobile gear to upgrade to iOS 6, the flashy refresh that promised some 200 new features. That number of early adopters amounts to a quarter of the user base, which is even more impressive when you consider that older iPhones, iPod touches and the first generation iPad aren’t eligible for the upgrade.

The promise of iOS 6 is encouraging. Yes, Siri remains beta, but she does more things and also works on the new iPad. All right, the voice seems more computerized, but when it works, Siri is fun. When it doesn’t work, and that’s true for a surprising number of people who don’t have the menacing voice and glare of actor Samuel L. Jackson, Siri can be utterly frustrating. That explains why Apple has been named in several legal actions, although you’d think that a beta label would be sufficient warning that it’s not perfect. But those TV ads strongly imply otherwise. How can Siri not be perfect if famous people can use it without problem, or maybe that’s a skill only an actor possesses.

Among the other promising features, Passbook seems a terrific way to store gift cards, coupons, boarding passes, movie tickets and such in a single app that’s time and location-based. Of course, that depends on the company you deal with actually supporting Passbook. Some might have preferred that Apple not just add Passbook, but include NFC capability (the near-field radio feature that lets you charge your credit card wirelessly) in the iPhone 5, but such a decision would be questionable right now since such support is hit or miss.

Other enhancements seem less compelling. Being able to open a site on your iPad, and pick up where you left off on the iPhone is nice, but little more. Having more choices in the Share menu is encouraging, but what about allowing apps to add themselves to the screen? I’m thinking in terms of something you can apparently do on the latest versions of Google’s Android.

Apple did answer lots of complaints by allowing you to store multiple account-based signatures in Mail. This is a feature many of you have long wanted, and you wonder why Apple didn’t take it seriously until now. It does put an end to some third-party multi-signature apps, but the one I tried and paid for never worked anyway, so I’ve since removed it (I can’t recall the name). The other feature, VIP, lets you flag a contact, and have messages from that person show up in a special mailbox. This feature matches the one that premiered in Mail for Mountain Lion.

Certainly Face-book integration is neat, assuming you’re an active social networker. I also like the idea of having more options with which to respond to a phone call from someone who is not in my contact list, though I’d still like to see a dedicated Redial button. As it stands, you redial by tapping Call without selecting a new number. The one last dialed will appear, requiring another tap to dial. Or maybe Apple feels the Phone keyboard is too busy already (I don’t).

Now these features, and most of the others added to iOS 6, aren’t really jaw-droppers. You will welcome them, of course, but not suffer tremendously if you decide to stick with iOS 5.

The real cliffhanger, however, remains Maps. In recent days, Apple has apparently begun to repair this highly-flawed service. Apple made a huge deal of the use of vector graphics, 3D views, and all the other goodies. It looked nice, but didn’t work so well when it came to some destinations and landmarks. If you want to use a public transit system, you have to rely on third-party apps. Sure that presents an opportunity for developers, but I suspect Apple just didn’t have time to finish this feature. By iOS 7, it may be that several app developers will find they are redundant. Or maybe Apple will buy one of those companies, and leverage their technology.

However, Maps came highly flawed, with distorted or incomplete 3D images, misplaced landmarks, and flaky accuracy when it came to turn-by-turn navigation. The defects were demonstrated with screenshots, thus becoming viral. Apple got hit by reviewers, and harder by customers who made a huge deal over the loss of Google Maps.

My old friend David Pogue, the tech columnist for The New York Times, lamented that he was late to a public appearance because Maps sent him to the wrong place. Yes, I suppose David should have had a backup, perhaps a Google Maps printout, but the experience makes for a good story, and I trust he gave the appropriate apologies to his audience. And you well understand why Tim Cook apologized, and even recommended other people’s mapping apps.

However, my encounters with Maps aren’t so severely flawed. Sure, some landmarks are a little difficult to find, unless the search request is really precise. But most routes I’ve tried have been presented accurately. A few hours before I wrote this column, in fact, I let Maps devise a destination to a location about 35 miles from here, a place where I had never visited. Throwing caution to the wind, and not having enough time to pursue other options, I let the app do its thing, and it accurately took me on a very direct route to the correct destination. That’s just what I want in a navigation app, and I wonder how long it’ll take Apple to issue a press release touting how much they improved Maps.

In total, I think iOS 6 is a worthy upgrade. The complaints, other than Maps, are few, and the defects don’t appear to be show-stoppers. My conclusion: If your iOS gadget is compatible, just go for it.

One thing that’s certain with the current Mapgate controversy, and that is that the media never seems to tire of speculating what Steve Jobs would have done had he survived. This conversation seems to fill most every discussion about what Apple is up to, and what they’ve done. It’s particularly prominent when there’s a perceived failure.

Did I say failure?

Well, some say that Apple made a huge mistake with the iPhone 5. Maybe it lacked a few features that you’ll find on other smartphones, and maybe it’s all about having a subpar mapping application. Supposedly an accurate mapping service is a key feature of a mobile OS, and woe be the company that cannot deliver a credible navigation app.

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As a business, when you have a loyal base of customers, you usually can be assured that they will tolerate failures or defects from time to time, usually if you level with them about what went wrong. Corporate spin control is a fine art, but quite often it’s all about honestly admitting a problem and explaining to the customer in clear language what’s being done to set things right.

Unfortunately, corporate communications departments do not always understand the concept of being simple and direct. You get half-baked apologies, usually signed by a corporate executive, which might as well have been written for a race of robotic creatures. Within the morass of corporate speak, there’s often very little of substance to be found. An apology is far less than an apology.

When the issue at hand can impact the health and safety of a customer, getting the truth out becomes paramount. Lives may be at stake. This is true whether the defective product is a drug or a car. But when it comes to recalls to fix a defect in an auto or other consumer product, quite often the message is lost in legalese, and the consequences of not fixing what needs to be fixed aren’t always clearly explained. It may even take months to realize there’s even a problem, and that trouble reports aren’t just random isolated cases that may not have any real connection to a defective product.

With Apple, you have reason to expect a higher standard and prompt fixes when stuff goes wrong. While customers of the iPhone, iPad, iPod and Mac usually register higher satisfaction rates than customers of most any other tech company, it’s up to Apple to keep them happy. Some believe the Apple mystique or halo is sufficient to keep customers pleased as punch even regardless. But there are limits to how much abuse a customer will take before they go elsewhere.

Now I’m now saying Apple has abused customers, but sometimes they have treated them with less respect than they deserve.

Take the original iPhone, which went on sale in 2007 at $499 for the 4GB version and $599 for the 8GB version. The price may have seemed awfully high, but it was unsubsidized, so you weren’t saddled with a wireless service contract if you bought one. Within just a few months, the 4GB version was discontinued, and the 8GB version was repriced at $399. As you might imagine, loads of iPhone users were upset. Price protections would apply for people who bought their iPhones 14 or 30 days earlier, but that wasn’t enough.

In a questionable corporate move, Steve Jobs made one of his typically snarky offhand remarks that it was the price of being an early adopter. But it didn’t take long for him to walk back that comment, and agree to give those affected iPhone customers a $100 credit when buying new Apple gear. Maybe it wasn’t all they could do, but the furor quickly died down.

Segue to the summer of 2010, when the iPhone 4 was saddled with complaints about poor reception if you held the unit the “wrong” way. So hold it differently said Jobs, and you wonder if he didn’t come up with such an insult in the wee hours of the morning while his mind was otherwise occupied. Regardless, the excuse didn’t last long. While it was perfectly true that all mobile handsets could be made to suffer from poor reception if your hands covered the antennas in some fashion, Apple got the brunt of the complaints. After all, the iPhone supposedly had a superior antenna system.

It didn’t take long for Apple to come up with a new excuse for Antennagate. It was a problem of perception, because the signal strength display algorithm was off. Apple released the update, but having a more accurate indicator didn’t change the fact that poor signals would result in unacceptable call quality, slow Internet access and disconnects.

So Steve Jobs finally held a press conference, where some members of the press were invited to a guided tour of Apple’s $100 antenna testing facility. This time, Jobs said it was all about the laws of physics, as he revealed that other popular smartphones had similar problems when a so-called Death Grip was applied. Without admitting any fault with the iPhone 4’s design, Apple nonetheless offered free bumpers and third-party cases to shield the phone, and prevent possible signal loss. In retrospect, Consumer Reports magazine, never a fan of Apple, refused to recommend the phone because of perceived antenna defects, and even refused to admit the other phones experienced the same symptoms if held “appropriately.”

This year, Apple has another big customer relations problem, but it was resolved differently. When the new Maps app debuted in iOS 6, customers quickly realized something was wrong. Landmarks might be misplaced, 3D views revealed melting or missing bridges, directions might be off, and if you wanted information on public transportation, you had to install someone else’s app.

At first, Apple PR merely promised things would get better as customers reported problems to Apple. A few days later, CEO Tim Cook issued a textbook apology that seemed at once heartfelt and descriptive. Apple was sorry, Apple was working hard to do better and, by the way, if you can’t wait, feel free to go online and or download someone else’s mapping app. He even offered a short list that included apps from Google and Microsoft.

I won’t blame Apple for making a home-brewed mapping app. Clearly they weren’t getting the love from Google to deliver a turn-by-turn directions and vector graphics. But if Apple had simply put a Beta label on Maps, you’d understand that it was a work in progress and might have bugs. Yes, the marketing message is more subdued than it used to be; maybe Apple believes things will get better in a few weeks. Will that be enough? I expect that it will, but I still think Apple should have anticipated the fallout, and presented a more honest expression of the limitations of Maps before the complaints became viral.

Meanwhile, it has been reported in several places that there are already improvements to the rendering of images, particularly 3D views, in Maps, including the Statue of Liberty. I checked out a few places in Brooklyn, NY where I lived as a child, and, yes, they look a whole lot more realistic.

The latest rumors have it that Apple will hold a media event later this month to unleash a smaller iPad, scheduled to ship no later than early November. If true, it would make the so-called iPad mini a potential hot ticket for the holiday season.

There’s yet a new published report, from the Wall Street Journal, indicating the production ramp-up began in September, again suggesting an October media event, with the smaller iPad showing up in stores the following week.

Now it’s one thing for rumors to appear in a site devoted to such material, but when a mainstream newspaper is the source for the information, you have to at least take it seriously. Maybe not necessarily to the bank, but there have been quite enough hints and published prototype photos that make the prospect of a smaller iPad just plain logical.

Besides, it would seem that the market is more than ready for a smaller tablet, witness the apparent success of the 7-inch Amazon Kindle Fire, and the move by other companies, including Google and Barnes & Noble, into a market segment where they expect to have a clear path to great sales.

Even though Steve Jobs, in one of his famous bouts of exaggeration, spoke of the need for sandpapering your fingers to use a smaller tablet, there are reasons why an iPad mini — or whatever it’s going to be called — would succeed. Consider that the 9.7-inch iPad is too large and too heavy for comfortable one-handed use. Some people want tablets for reading books and magazines and watching movies. A smaller iPad would be tailor-made for this purpose, and the rumored 7.85-inch form factor, with a 4:3 aspect ratio, would offer more screen real estate than the 7-inch widescreen models that have proliferated in the past year or so.

The other key reason is price. A 7-inch Kindle Fire HD, with 16GB of storage, sells for just $199. Apple is going to feel the pressure to be competitive. Sure, Amazon charges you $15 more to remove the ads, but they still don’t expect to make much of a profit from those sales. Kindles are meant as front ends for Amazon’s content. In the same way that printer makers sell hardware for little or no profit, and expect to make it up on the sale of ink and toner, Amazon wants you to buy products and services on a Kindle. If you spend enough money, the exercise in hardware making would make business sense.

Reports about iPad mini pricing are all over the place. Some suggest $249 for a 16GB version, somewhat of a premium to be sure, but not so much as to deter sales, particularly from people who are already invested in Apple’s ecosystem. I suppose $299 would work, but a higher price might just be too high for fast adoption of the smaller iPad.

However, an iPad has advantages over a Kindle and other smaller tablets. In addition to having far more apps, not to mention a superior interface and user experience, Apple doesn’t keep you from buying content from Amazon. Whether you just use Safari, or download the Kindle e-book app, an iPad is also a profit center for Amazon.

As you might expect, so-called industry analysts are already predicting doom and gloom for Apple. They are late to the party, and the other companies are already well entrenched. But it is not at all certain that 7-inch tablets have really gained a decent market share compared to the iPad. And even if that share is growing, a little brother (or sister) to the iPad may be a shrewd marketing move, particularly for existing Apple customers who want a more portable second device.

When it comes to new customers, the glow of the iPad may just be sufficient to grab sales of the mini version, even if it costs somewhat more that competing tablets. Of course, nothing stops people from buying on price and only price, and just coping with a lesser user experience.

I won’t even begin to make predictions as to how a smaller iPad will fare in the marketplace. While most of the tech media seems to believe there will be such a beast, Macworld’s Dan Moren remains skeptical. If it happens, however, and if Apple keeps the price reasonably low, success may be assured.

Meantime, it’s interesting to discover how the dream of a handheld computer was first expressed by Apple. Just the other day, a lost quote appeared from a speech Steve Jobs gave in 1983 at the Center for Design innovation. During a question-and-answer session, Jobs described his dream of a “computer in a book,” which is just one step from a tablet.

Here’s what he said:

Apple’s strategy is really simple. What we want to do is we want to put an incredibly great computer in a book that you can carry around with you and learn how to use in 20 minutes. That’s what we want to do and we want to do it this decade. And we really want to do it with a radio link in it so you don’t have to hook up to anything and you’re in communication with all of these larger databases and other computers.

They also depicted tablets on the bridge of the Starship Enterprise in the cult series “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” but that show didn’t debut until four years later. While some might dispute the image of a computer in a book as a harbinger of the PC’s future, it’s clear what Jobs meant. He may have been a couple of decades off, but the iPhone in 2007 and the iPad in 2010 did ultimately vindicate his vision.