Mine updated when I turned it off just after midnight. I haven't even tried single mode yet (will do that tonight), but it's already a big improvement over L169:
--Channel changing, menus, etc. respond MUCH more quickly than before, more like the 311 I started out with.
--"Time Left" now appears in program banner; shows time remaining in program. Because of this, rating now appears on same line as program name (which occasionally causes long program names to end in ellipsis).
--Bouncing box on audio channels (Sirius or DishCD) now bounces over the whole screen, not just the upper-left 2/3.
--After entering a channel number via keypad, if it doesn't go there immediately, pressing Select will skip the wait. This works for channels 500-999 (PPV, DL, DishCD), as well as for locals if you don't key the leading zeroes (i.e., 7 instead of 007). The 311 had this "select feature"; not having it on the 522 annoyed me every time I wanted to go to a DishCD channel.
--When going up or down thru OpenTV channels (101, 9500), you now get a box to press Select to enter the application; you can go up or down instead to the next channel. Before, if you paused more than a fraction of a second (even before the banner disappeared), you had to wait for the "application loading" box, THEN press up or down, to go back to the last channel you watched--usually NOT the channel you wanted. This is better than the 311, which handled 101 like this version does, and 9500 like older 522 firmware.
--BAD CHANGE: If you have "second dish" locals in your market (Little Rock has two), don't have the second dish, and are changing channels up or down on either default favorites list, it now stops on those locals and gives you the "you must have a second dish" channel instead of skipping them. It did this before in the EPG per FCC mandate, but now it happens with old fashioned channel-surfing too--an annoyance NOT mandated by the FCC! (I don't think E* wants to give away second dishes THAT badly--or are they about to add a "call your congressman" message, which may well backfire and lead to Congress putting a quick end to the two-dish solution?)