This update now is paving the way for the 1.1 release. Something big must be lurking just around the corner.

You need now (when it reaches your country) to do the 'small update' ready to do the 'Big Update' - this is the preliminary.

My guess would be this is also a dry run on how well the infrastructure copes when everyone updates at once.

The old wisdom is that there is never time to changes, so one might do them immediately as later on they are always harder to do. If the organization is twice the size, is change any easier? I do not see how the project scale or QA matters here - basically all active linux distros are doing delayless bugfix updates. It is just about the organizations leaders willingness and skills. 1) identify target 2) find out what is preventing from reaching the target 3) fix the issues.. easy peasy..

That's a good point. It was pretty obvious after this first update that the maemo.org repositories couldn't cope with the load.. has anyone heard about anything planned to deal with this for the next time the world presses "update" simultaneously? Personally, I gave the repository update 5 minutes to complete - when it didn't I just disabled all maemo.org repos, then it completed in under 30 seconds.

Yes, since it´s never been an "official" FW update before it was pretty much expected that they would do a thing like this to try-out their distribution system and also very clever to grant access to ovi-beta and probably going over the numbers of how many people that hit the store after it went up

Personally I prefer they take their time to release a new FW rather then handing out broken/ not enough upgrades or even worse, a firmware that have to be patched over and over to "fix" new problem that occurred with the new shiny FW release.

Just remember to stay away from the dev apps and poke around in rootsh unless you know what your doing, and your phone will be fine till we get the new shiny toys!