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Samsung USA has stated that nearly half of the 1 million of the Galaxy Note7 impacted by the recent recall have been returned here in the US.  That’s actually really great news as owners of the Note7 have taken the recall pretty seriously and returned the devices to their carrier or the store from which they bought it for a replacement.

Samsung Electronics America, Inc. announced today that about half of all recalled Galaxy Note7 phones sold in the U.S. have been exchanged through Samsung’s voluntary recall. Additionally, 90 percent of Galaxy Note7 owners have been opting to receive the new Galaxy Note7 since the phones became widely available on Wednesday, September 21.

It would appear too that users are opting to stick with the Note7 upon that exchange of their devices although they have mostly had the option to go with a different device if they so choose.

Happy Birthday Android!  Back on September 23, 2008, Android 1.o made its debut with T-Mobile G1, also known as the HTC Dream making it commercially available for the first time.  As we who love the platform know, it has grown exponentially in features, performance and functionality over the past 8 years and it is exciting to think of what the next 8 years hold in store for it.

To be fair, there is a lot of confusion on the Interwebs on the exact birthday of Android but it seems to come down to two dates.  The first, September 23, 2008 as I mentioned before being the commercially available date.  There is also the date of November 5, 2007.  That is the day that the beta of Android 1.0 was made available.  It seems pretty clear in Google’s mind however that the September 23rd date is the one of record and clearly is the one they are celebrating.

If there is one fact in Android life that remains true, it is that Samsung will be slow in getting updates out to their devices.  It was four months after Android Marshmallow was released before the company pushed it out to the Galaxy S6 and they have been even slower on other devices and releases.  So when reports that Samsung has a test build of Android Nougat in the wild for the Galaxy S7, just weeks after it was released, it is good news.

Before you get your hopes up, no, a release of Nougat on the S7 lineup is not immanent.  In fact it is probably months away.  But SamMobile is reporting that Samsung has confirmed to them that they are indeed testing Nougat on a S7.

The good news is that the Chromium team has released into the stable channel a build of Chrome OS that supports Android apps.  The bad news is that, for now, it is only for two devices.  We have been waiting for months now for the release to happen and technically the support of Android apps is still in beta, but it is finally to the production build of the OS for users and that is a great sign of things to come.

Officially the build is 53.0.2785.129 (Platform version: 8530.90.0) and it is available for the Acer Chromebook R11 and the Asus Chromebook Flip.  Readers may recall that these two devices along with the Chromebook Pixel 2015 from Google have had the ability to run Android apps for a while in the beta channel.  Essentially this update brings the support to all users with these devices.