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What's up?
Brian Tong here and welcome to Googlicious for everything inside the world of Google And unfortunately, we start off with one of the biggest fails we've ever seen in consumer electronics with the Samsung Galaxy Note 7. Now I called it, the best one of 2016 and it really was until, you know, things went kaboom.
[NOISE]
and then it went kabooie [NOISE]
again.
Now Samsung has completed halted production of the Note 7, and they even started shipping out Note 7 return kits last week, that included gloves, and were made of fireproof packaging.
According to Apteligent, there are still over one million Galaxy Note 7s.
Still in use right now.
So if you're one of those people, please just give it up because denial isn't just a river in Egypt.
Plus Sammy's making an effort to persuade people to remain loyal to the brand by offering a $100 Dollar credit for anyone that is exchanging their device for another Samsung phone.
Now people who exchange it at a carrier store for another brand phone get a $25 credit and they know this is as bad as it can get but hey, at least they're trying.
Now according to the Wall Street Journal, initial costs from the Note 7 debacle have completely wiped Samsung's $2.3 billion of projected mobile profits for the quarter, with the whole being as large at $3 billion.
We've talked in the past about Samsung's rush to get out the Note 7 to take advantage of a lackluster iPhone release this year Except it literally blew up in their face, but what was really behind this?
According to reports at Breakdown, the Note 7's design exerted undue pressure on its battery pack which in turn resulted in the negative and positive poles To come into contact.
And voila, the smoke.
You know, where there's smoke there's fire.
Plus Samsung's SDI batteries prove to be too big for a design that was trying to be as slim as possible while also being waterproof.
When they went for replacement batteries from China's ATL The second time around even that fix the problem.
Now the Note 7's design was also tightly sealed not by screws but by grew that held it all together so they couldn't even tell customers to remove the battery because it was glued down.
And I fix it tear down even shows taking apart was not an easy task.
So, such for the best phone of 2016 16.
But what are some of the alternatives out there for you right now?
Well, if you're a Samsung person, you can always get that $100 back and go for an S7 Edge.
It's the easiest phone to transition to, you won't lose anything from a spec standpoint, but you'll miss the S Pen bigger screen and USBC.
Now this might seem like you're going backwards, but if you're all about the S Pen, The Note 5 is the closest thing to the Note 7's functionality.
Maybe Samsung even brings a software upgrade to bring some of the new features to the 5, but the Android phone I'm most excited about is the Pixel and in this case, we'll go large with the Pixel XL.
It's a great big screen alternative with a pure Android nugget And the Google Assistant coming October 20th.
Other great alternatives include its Korean rival, and the LG B20 that's a spec beast with a 5.7 inch screen and a removable battery to boast.
That's coming out October 28th.
And the OnePlus 3 is a feature packed 5.5 AMOLED display phone.
It's half the price at 399 and comes packed with a whooping, Six gigs of RAM.
And you know, if you were willing to finally switch over to the fruity side, the iPhone 7 Plus is another big screen gem that deserves your attention if you're fed up and ready to go Apple.
Or, you can just watch for the Samsung Galaxy S8.
Yep, the rumors are already out there and San Mobile reports that we could see two Galaxy S8 variants.
One is rumored to feature a 2K, 5.1 inch curved super AMOLED display, while the other will have a 5.5 inch 4K display.
It will come equipped with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 830 processor or Samsung's own Exinos 8895.
A dual camera lens system will be exclusive to the larger screen phone.
And the VIV artificial intelligence assistant that Samsung recently acquired from VIV Labs will replace S Voice.
The guess is that I will see a launch of Mobile World Congress in February of 2017 which, honestly, isn't even that far away.
And in Google News, two new commercials between the first Made by Google Pixel phone have arrived showing a search bar morphed into the shape of their new [UNKNOWN] phone.
The phone is already completely sold out on the Play Store except for the berry silver and quiet [UNKNOWN] five-inch model to 32 gigs Really blue, sold out in just a couple days, which left some of you really blue.
Also, the phones are expected to shift October the 20th.
And I have one coming my way, and taking a page from what they've learned working on both hardware and software.
And then last reports that the Google made smartwatches running the next version of Android 2.0 will be delayed until the first quarter of 2017.
There hasn't been much news recently.
But two devices are still in the works that supports swappable bands.
The slimmer 42 millimeter watch code named Swordfish features a single button interface and gets rid of the flat tire design Now the more advanced of the two watches, co-named Angelfish, will feature LTE and GPS, and allow the watch to work as a stand alone device that does not require a phone.
It also includes a heartrate sensor and a three button design.
All right, that's gonna do it for this week.
You can always email me at googlicious@cnet.com or tweet me @briantong.
Thanks for watching.
We'll catch y'all next Time for some more of that Googlicious.
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Googlicious.
