Android 4.1 Jelly Bean is released by Google at Google I/O 2012 along with release of Google’s Nexus 7 tablet manufactured by ASUS, which becomes the first device to get the latest Android. Jelly Bean comes with loads of new and improved features and we will try to cover them in this post as much as we can. Keep in mind that we are still to get access to any device running Android Jelly Bean and hence all that we report here is based on what Google said at Google I/O 2012 and related documentation that was made available later on the web.
Fast & smooth and Better Battery life
Jelly Bean promises to be fast, fluid and smooth like butter.
Jelly Bean makes your Android device even more responsive by boosting your device’s CPU instantly when you touch the screen, and turns it down when you don’t need it to improve battery life.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V5E5revikUU
Expandable Notifications
Notification centre has been one of the biggest feature on Android devices and everyone of us loved it. With Android 4.1 Jelly Bean, Notifications are pandable going to play much better role in what you do on your devices. Notifications are now expandable and include the ability to perform actions with the notifications that you recieve.
Now you can take action directly from the notifications shade without going back to your home screen to open another app e.g if you are late for a meeting, then you can email everyone to let them know or if you missed a call then you can call them back in an instant right from within the notification center.
Resizable app widgets
Jelly Bean comes with improved App Widgets with the ability to automatically resize based on location of widget on home screen, the size to which the user expands them, and space available on the home screen. Even though this feature looks small, but it can play a big role in customising and personalising the screens of devices.
Smart KeyBoard
Many users on Android devices have been using third party Keyboard apps like Swype and swiftkey as the default keyboards with Android are not that feature rich as may be required by many users. Jelly Bean now comes with a better keyboard with more accurate and relevant dictonaries along with the ability to guess the next word before you type by adapting itself over time.
With improved text to speech capability, you can use your voice to type more accurately than before and that too without getting online i.e voice typing works even if you have no data connection or you are offline.
Android Beam
Jelly Bean comes with Android Beam for NFC enabled devices letting you share photos and videos with just a simple tap, in addition to sharing contacts, web pages, YouTube videos, directions, and apps by leveraging Bluetooth for the data transfer. When the user triggers a transfer, Android Beam hands over from NFC to Bluetooth, making it easy to manage the transfer of a file from one device to another.
Smart incremental App Updates
Every Android user hates to download the full APK of the apps for every minor updates that come too frequent for most of the apps. With Jelly Bean, Whenever developers publish an update Google Play now delivers only the bits that have changed to devices, rather than the entire APK. This incremental update saves loads of data bandwidth for users which in turn saves some battery too.
Google Voice Search and Google Now
Android 4.1 comes with a much better Google Voice search which you can call a direct competitor to Apple Siri though Google avoided giving it a name. It uses the Google Knowledge graph to give you search results when you speak to your device.
Apart from the much improved Google Voice search, it also comes with a “Google Now” feature which tells you about different things automatically that you do daily without any user intervention based on your location and the things that you do. e.g it can tell you today’s weather before you start your day, how much traffic to expect before you leave for work, when the next train will arrive as you’re standing on the platform, or your favorite team’s score while they’re playing.
Apart from all the features that we talked about above, it include many more improvements like support for additional languages like Kannada, Telugu, and Malayalam. You can get more details about all the Jelly Bean Features here.
