iOS 5.1 and iTunes Match (Genius is back, baby!) 

As mentioned in previous posts, there were a few things (Genius, better artwork syncing) that would probably have required an iOS update to get working.

Well, iOS 5.1 is here and Genius is back and it is glorious. Right under playlists is "Genius Playlist", like it used to be, pre-iTunes Match. One thing to be aware of, though, is that it will pull in music that isn't local to your phone so if you're somewhere without an internet connection, your Genius playlist might not have quite as much music as you'd hoped. And, your phone will download the songs that are in the cloud, so if you keep a carefully cultivated music library on your iOS device, you'll be littering it with anything that gets thrown into your Genius playlist.

The jury is still out a bit on artwork, but my iPhone does seem to be far more responsive downloading artwork, and it will load the artwork without having to leave and come back to the song. And once downloaded, at least in my very, very early testing, the phone seemed to be doing a better job of caching that artwork. That's at least promising.

Slowly, Apple is ironing out the wrinkles in iCloud and iTunes Match.