The Technology newsbucket: Apple updates, WP7's slow start, Symbian's failure and more

Photo by Torley on Flickr. Some rights reserved A quick burst of 6 links for you to chew over, as picked by the Technology team About the Mac OS X v10.6.5 Update >> Apple Lots of pretty abstruse changes. "You should back up your system before installation". Yes, always wise. Firefox v4 beta7 released >> MozillaWiki Still has a few "blockers" but this is the feature-complete form. Now it wants to be bug-incomplete. Microsoft Sells 40K Windows 7 Phones >> TheStreet It's surely shortsighted to judge WP7 on the basis of one not-certain day's sales. But here you go: "So how does 40,000 Window 7 phones measure up? Google said last month that it was selling 200,000 Android phones a day. And Apple has said that its iPhone sales rate was 270,000 a day. Microsoft didn't help itself much, said Michael Cote, an industry strategist with the Cote Collaborative. 'Mondays aren't great launch days. They poured all that cash into it but they lost track of the fact that Fridays or Saturdays are the best launch days,' said Cote." Give it time. Analyst estimates 100,000 DROID smartphones sold in first weekend [Nov 2009] >> Engadget Just for comparison for anyone who wants to laugh and point at Windows Phone 7's first couple of days. Look at where Android is now, too. Symbian OS – one of the most successful failures in tech history >> TechCrunch EU Guest Post Tim Ocock, a former Symbian staffer with access up and down the organisation, considers what it did and didn't have. "Symbian has never been an OS for internet phones. The Symbian definition of a smartphone was a phone with PDA functions. The browser was always a second class citizen, a third party component – Opera by default in the early days, but freely replaced with a licensee's preferred option. Perhaps where Symbian started slipping in quality was the need, caused by the appearance of iPhone, to compete in the internet phone space too, a space Symbian thought it was in and thought it was winning without realising iPhone was something all together different." Very thoughtful and in-depth. Cooks Source Issues A Statement >> How Publishing Really Works After the furore of last week, the magazine has made a $130 donation to the Columbia School of Journalism. You can follow Guardian Technology's linkbucket on delicious To suggest links, tag articles on delicious.com with "guardiantech"