Sofia Elizabella Wyciślik-Wilson

The Galaxy Note7 has been nothing short of an unmitigated disaster for Samsung. Problems with exploding batteries wiped billions off the value of the company and led to a recall, but it soon transpired that even replacement handsets were problematic, with a number of reports of replacement handsets overheating, catching fire, or exploding.

Now South Korean news agency Yonhap reports that Samsung has temporarily suspended production of the flagship Android smartphone. It's a move that will unnerve investors, but one that is being carried out in conjunction with safety regulators from South Korea, the United States and China.

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Starting in December, smartphone manufacturers will no longer be required to install Hangouts on their handsets. Instead, phone makers will need to provide users with the recently-launched Duo.

This is not to say that Hangouts is being killed off -- not yet, at least. But Duo, complete with end-to-end encryption, will replace the app as part of the core Google Mobile Services package.

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If you're a keen Facebook user, you may well have accepted invites to events advertised on the social network. To help make your life a little easier, Facebook has now launched a new, dedicated app called simply Events from Facebook to more easily find out what's going on nearby.

More than this, the app can pull in information from your existing calendar so you can see all of your events and appointments in one place to avoid double-booking yourself. It's iOS-only for the time being, but an Android version of the app is in the pipeline.

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There is only a month to go until the election showdown between Trump and Clinton finally comes to an end. There is a great deal riding on the result of this particular election and we have already seen DNC servers hacked.

There has been speculation about who may have been responsible for this security breach, but now the US has pointed the finger firmly at Putin's Russia. Russian hackers are accused of hacking into the Democratic National Committee's servers and trying "to interfere with the US election process".

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Any sort of exercise is made a little easier if you're listening to music. With this in mind, Google has teamed up with Runtastic to provide access to curated playlists in Google Play Music for keen runners.

It's a feature that is -- at the moment, at least -- exclusive to Android users, and it makes it easy to choose music that will suit your mood, or the speed at which you're motoring along.

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It's no secret that there's an Android 7.0 Nougat update on the way to the OnePlus 3, but the question is: when?

Of course it is already possible to get Nougat running on your OnePlus 3 if you're willing to install a custom Cyanogenmod 14 build. But what most people are interested in is the official release direct from OnePlus. Well, it's not only in the works, we have a video of it in action.

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The newly announced Pixel and Pixel XL caused great interest at the beginning of the week. Described by the company as being "the first phone made by Google inside and out" (even though we know that HTC is involved) you would expect that Android updates would be coming courtesy of Google itself.

If you thought that, you'd be wrong. Possibly. It depends where you buy your Pixel from. Buy it from Google, and Google will indeed be responsible for the update process. Buy it from Verizon -- Google's exclusive US partner -- and Verizon will be the one handling system updates, creating something of a two-tier system.

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There are many ways to try to learn a new language, ranging from audio books and text books, to software and web-based options. One learning tool that's proving popular at the moment is Duolingo, and a new feature has been introduced that helps to provide an immersive linguistic experience.

It is said that one of the best ways to learn a language is to visit the country that speaks it and surround yourself with native speakers. As this is not always possible, Duolingo's new chatbot feature could be the next best thing.

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There are a number of benefits to being a Windows Insider, the primary one being that you gain access to the latest features before anyone else. If you're running build 14936 of Windows 10, there's a new option available that will be of interest to many people -- the ability to remove built-in apps.

It's something that Windows 10 users have been looking for for some time, and it's not quite clear why it has taken Microsoft so long to make the option available. The good news is that it is now possible to remove some of the default apps that you simply do not need; the bad news is that there are still some that remain untouchable.

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Facebook has been testing its privacy-focused Secret Conversations feature with a select, and then wider, group of users for a little while now. Today the end-to-end encrypted messaging system rolls out to everyone. If you're concerned about your privacy (firstly, why are you using Facebook?), it's your duty to use it.

Secret Conversations remains an opt-in feature, and once enabled it means that only the sender and recipient are able to see messages -- there is no scope for interception by Facebook or any other third party. There's also an important self-destructing messaging option, but there's one glaring problem.

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If you have been looking for one more reason to become an Amazon Prime subscriber, the newly launched Prime Reading feature could just be the clincher.

Prime Reading gives US subscribers access to a library of free Kindle ebooks, magazines, comics and other publications completely free of charge. At the moment Amazon is proclaiming there are "over a thousand popular books", but there is also the promise of exclusive content.

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Yahoo has been having something of a rough time of late, and things are not getting any easier. It has emerged that the company created a custom tool to search customers' emails for specific terms as directed by the NSA and FBI.

Reuters shares the story of two former Yahoo employees who say the company complied with a government directive to search through all incoming emails. In response to the revelations, Apple, Google and Microsoft have all denied engaging in similar activity.

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It may have been one of the worst kept secrets in tech launches, but today Google officially took the wraps off its Pixel and Pixel XL smartphones. In terms of hardware it could be argued that there is nothing too spectacular here, but even if you ignore the (still very impressive) hardware side of things there are two features that directly take on Apple: Google Assistant to compete with Siri, and unlimited full-resolution photo backup.

Unlike Google's previous Nexus range, the Pixel handsets carry no other branding -- these are the first phones designed and built inside and out by Google and Google alone. We already knew just about everything about the two handsets -- which neatly compete with the iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus, but now everything, and more, has been confirmed.

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It's something that has faint echoes of Microsoft's approach to pushing Windows 10 on to users. This week Apple is making macOS Sierra available to users as an automatic download -- interestingly, users who receive the automatic download treatment are being selected randomly.

Apple confirmed the nature of the roll out to The Loop, which also reports that the download will only start for people who have automatic updates switched on, and if they have sufficient storage space available. Unlike Microsoft, Apple is taking a rather less aggressive approach when it comes to suggesting users might like to upgrade to the latest version of the operating system.

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Mozilla's love of open source is nothing new -- just look to the Mozilla Open Source Support (MOSS) program. Loving a philosophy is one thing, but Mozilla has also put its money where its mouth is.

In the third quarter of this year, MOSS awarded more than $300,000 to four projects which it either already supported, or which were aligned with the organization's mission. One of the smallest awards -- $56,000 -- was made to Speech Rule Engine, a text-to-speech style component that makes mathematical and scientific content more accessible.

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