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In all of the chaos surrounding Samsung at the minute, it would have been easy to miss that the South Korean company would be making a limited edition Blue Coral version of the Galaxy S7 Edge.  That color option will only be available in limited markets and fortunately, the United States courtesy of AT&T, will be one of them.  The carrier has added the Blue Coral option to their S7 Edge website, allowing customers or new to AT&T customers select the frankly stunningly beautiful muted blue phone.  While orders are being taken now, it won’t actually ship for another few weeks.  AT&T indicates that it will be shipping between November 18-22 this month.

Price wise, it is what you would expect for the flagship device from Samsung.  To buy it outright is $794.99 while you do have payment options thanks to the AT&T Next program.  For $26.50 per month you can use the Next program which is a 30 month payment option.  You can upgrade after you have paid 80% of the phone (roughly $635).  The AT&T Next Year program offers a 24 month upgrade plan which is $33.13 per month and you can upgrade after you have paid 50% of the value of the phone (roughly $397).

Continue reading after the break…

For those of you who were really wanting one of the Really Blue Pixel phones, there is good news for you this morning.  Google has confirmed to Android Police that the limited color variant of both the Pixel and the Pixel XL will be restocked at some point in the future.  The question is when and how many will actually be available.  That part of the equation is not known but if you are really wanting to get your hands on a Really Blue Pixel, it is suggested that you use the Google Store’s waitlist function to get in line.

Google Pixel in Really Blue

Functionally, as readers likely know, there is no difference in performance between the various color variants.  The Really Blue color however was immediately sought after as it was unique in this world of mostly black, silver (aluminum) and gold phones on the market.

If you want to join the waitlist for the phone, go to the Google Store and sign up to be notified on when it is back in stock.  Obviously there is no guarantee they will be there if you delay once you are notified.  These will go very, very fast (translation:  within minutes if not sooner).  If you want one, be prepared to pay the day they hit the store.

Good Luck!

Today’s Deal is on the solid performing BLU VIVO 5R.  This 5.5″ phone as a 13MP Sony-built camera, 3GB of RAM and 32GB of storage and today, is on sale at Amazon for $179 for the gold version of the phone.  That’s a great price for a phone with the specs of this phone.  The phone is for GSM carriers here in the United States so it will work with the likes of AT&T, T-Mobile, Cricket, MetroPCS and Straight Talk.  It has multiple bands for LTE (2/4/7/12/17) and for HSPA+ (850/1700/1900/2100).  Unfortunately for readers on Sprint, Verizon or U.S. Cellular, this phone isn’t for you as it won’t work on those CDMA networks.

The VIVO 5R is a beautiful device with a curved glass display, a slim 8.1mm design constructed of aluminum and it has a Fingerprint Scanner.

Today the Android team released their distribution report meets install base report and Android Nougat has made its debut in the report.  While the number is small – .3% – it is a positive sign that it has hit this report after a month on essentially only Nexus devices.  Given that other manufactures and Google themselves have rolled out the new Pixel lineup with Nougat, this number is only going to go up and likely at a faster clip than that of Marshmallow.  Speaking of Marshmallow, that build had a healthy bump in usage this month, up to 24% of the install base.  That’s up several percentage points over the October report.

Interesting, king of the hill remains to be Android Lollipop.  That now 2+ year old version of Android is on 34.1% of all devices that hit the Play Store for the week ending November 7, 2016.  Given the huge number of devices that are out there running Lollipop and that will never see an update to Marshmallow, it is likely that KitKat’s install base will continue to be high for quite some time.