Remember when Apple surpassed Nokia to become the world's best-selling smartphone manufacturer? Well, Apple only had one quarter to enjoy this title, since Samsung just soared past them by quadrupling its smartphone shipments, making Samsung the largest smartphone manufacturer in the world. Update: As was noted in the comments, Apple also uses shipments - they just call them sales. Straight from their SEC filing.

"The announcement that Nexus One users won't be getting upgraded to Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich led some to justifiably question Google's support of their devices. I look at it a little differently: Nexus One owners are lucky. I've been researching the history of OS updates on Android phones and Nexus One users have fared much, much better than most Android buyers." I'm happy the modding community takes care of orphaned devices, but a solution it is not. I'm hoping the crop of Android phones released this past year - which were not included in this analysis - fair better. If there's one thing Google should steal from Apple, it's their iOS update support.

"In a move that will raise eyebrows, Mozilla is now distributing a version of Firefox that uses Bing as the default search provider instead of Google. Rest assured that this is a joint project, though: the creatively-named Firefox with Bing website is run by Microsoft, and both Mozilla and MS are clear that this is a joint venture. Now, don't get too excited - the default version of Firefox available from Mozilla.com is still backed by Google, and there's no mention of an alternative, Bingy download anywhere on the site - but it's worth noting that Mozilla has been testing Bing's capabilities using Test Pilot over the last couple of months, and the release of Firefox with Bing indicates that Mozilla is now confident in Bing's ability to provide a top-notch service to Firefox users." Test pilot or not, I'm stockpiling more baked beans.

"Google's Hugo Barra confirmed that the latest version of Android will be delivered as a free upgrade to the existing Nexus S handset 'within weeks'. He said the search giant was aiming to get the software to owners of the previous flagship phone shortly after the release of the new Galaxy Nexus handset next month, well in time for Christmas. Owners of the first official Google phone, the Nexus One, will not be getting the upgrade, however. Barra said the hardware was simply too old to run the new operating system." Can someone enlighten me - the Nexus One has 512MB of RAM, a 1Ghz processor, and a 480x800 AMOLED or SuperLCD. Why on earth isn't this thing upgraded to ICS? Lameballs.

Today is the start of Nokia World 2011, the event where Nokia would unveil its first Windows Phone 7 device(s). And so they did. The Finnish mobile giant unveiled two Windows Phone 7 smartphones, as well as four new Series 40 phones for emerging markets. The most interesting thing? Pricing. Pretty aggressive. Update: Anybody want a kidney?

Ten years ago today, Microsoft launched what would become the world's most popular desktop operating system - for better or worse. Its interface colours were... Interesting (trying hard to avoid bias here, folks, bear with me now). Its early performance was... Not always entirely up to par. Its security track record was... Well, it sucked hard in that department (I tried). We're ten years down the line, and thanks to Vista, way too many people are still using this relic.

The news already hit HackerNews late last night, but at that time there was no confirmation so I decided to wait until we knew for sure. Well, after Dennis Ritchie and Steve Jobs, the technology world lost another great mind yesterday. Stanford has confirmed that John McCarthy, the creator of LISP and the father of artificial intelligence, has passed away, age 84.

"Looking past the Metro hype, the Build conference also revealed promising road maps for C#, Visual Studio, and the .Net platform as a whole. Perhaps the most exciting demo of the conference for .Net developers, however, was Project Roslyn, a new technology that Microsoft made available yesterday as a Community Technology Preview. Roslyn aims to bring powerful new features to C#, Visual Basic, and Visual Studio, but it's really much more than that. If it succeeds, it will reinvent how we view compilers and compiled languages altogether."

Considering the polarising topic of software patents and related IP litigation is coming up a lot lately, I felt the need to write a few words on this thing called 'bias'. This word is being thrown around a lot, but I get the feeling many people are unclear as to what, exactly, it means. Because contrary to popular opinion, there's nothing wrong with being being biased. In fact, there's no such thing as unbiased blogging (or even unbiased journalism).

Appleinsider writes: "An anticipated Apple high-definition television set, complete with iOS features including Siri voice commands, FaceTime video chat and access to the App Store, would be a strong product in a massive $100 billion market, according to a new analysis." Last year I explained my vision of a smart TV too (read the comment), and my ideas were pretty much the same thing AppleInsider discusses about today. Back then I was almost laughed at by most OSNews residents for these ideas. I have the feeling that the people who then found my ideas ridiculous, they'll now find a possible Apple smart TV "natural" and "revolutionary".

I'll just link to this. Microsoft chest-thumping about being a patent troll.

"The first RC build for the FreeBSD-9.0 release cycle is now available. ISO images for the architectures amd64, i386, ia64, powerpc, powerpc64, and sparc64 are available on most of our FreeBSD mirror sites. One of the many new features in 9.0 we would like to be tested is the new installer, so we encourage our users to do fresh installation on test systems. Alternatively, users upgrading existing systems may now do so using the freebsd-update(8) utility."

Remember back when Nokia jumped to Windows Phone 7, abandoning all other platforms and future directions? Remember Elop's infamous 'burning platform' memo was coveniently 'leaked' to the web? Remember how Elop claimed Windows Phone 7 was the only way forward, since nothing else inside the company would be ready for prime time soon enough? Remember how I thought this was a very good and sane decision? Well, the first reviews of what will be the only MeeGo handset from Nokia (the N9) are in, and well... To whoever decided to go WP7 and ditch MeeGo: I don't like you. To myself: I'm an idiot for arguing this was a good idea.

Antonio Ospite explores Gnome 3 in fall-back mode and tries to make it look and behave more like Gnome 2.32 again. This summer Linus Torvalds made it to the news for complaining about the gnome-shell design; Gnome fall-back mode is the solution for those like Linus who can't - or better, do not want to - use gnome-shell just yet.