What’s New in Jelly Bean Android 4.1

by Antonio Wells Jun 27, 2012 3:06 PM – Leave your thoughts

Check out all of what’s new in Jelly Bean Android 4.1 as we wrap up all of the exciting announcements from Google I/O 2012, their annual developers conference in San Francisco.

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What’s New in Jelly Bean Android 4.1

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The stats for Android are always impressive and explode exponentially each time we are updated. Google recently announced more than 1 million Android activations daily and more than 400 million Android devices worldwide. The Google Play store now has more than 600,000 Android apps & games, averaging 1.5 billion installs per month (20 billion app installs to date), paid apps support in 132 countries, free apps support in 190 countries, more than 50% revenue comes from in-app billing, and more content is coming to the platform.

Jelly Bean brings smoother and faster graphics processing due to the Project Butter. There are improvements to how you organize your home screen. For example, you can drag a widget into a screen, which may not have enough space and the widget will automatically re-size itself; or you can drag a widget that has the room to fit and all of the other icons neatly and conveniently shift.

Voice Type is now available offline, great for when you don’t have a connection. However, just like many newly launched Google products it is only available in U.S. English at launch and other languages are planned to be supported.

The Camera has some slick improvements such as when you snap a shot you get a smoother animation of the photo flying out to the right. Additionally, you can slide to preview photos, swipe up to delete, tap to share and pinch-to-preview the video camera and previous pics.

New Android Notifications

Notifications are something Android had since day one; there’s another hipster OS that recently added this “innovative” new feature, however, JB takes it to the next level! Allowing you to do more in the notification window; namely…

You can call back and hangup a call
Gmail previews more information to get a quick read of the start of an email
Say you’re running late for a meeting and need to quickly email the group, you can do so with canned response templates
Share to Google+ without opening the app
We saw an example of controlling and adding favorite music without opening an app
Plus you can use two finger gestures to expand/contract news content in an app like Pulse News

Google Now Revamped Search for Android

Google Now is a feature that reminds me of a mash-up to Google’s answer to Siri, with specific regard to bringing back answers and learning your personal habits by examining your search history, location and calendar to better service your needs (the privacy police with be all over this!) To explain this feature, we saw Google demonstrate how someone would launch the feature, by swiping from the bottom of the screen up, then asking the app questions. Another example we saw was an aggregate of common information you may request; like current traffic & arrival times to/from work, if you ride public transit it tells you when the next train or bus will arrive, it can show you recommended places as you walk down street and even tell you what the place is best known for, and much more.

Device manufacturers will be happy for Google’s new Platform Development Kit (PDK) for hardware developers, as they will receive OS updates two to three months before all Android releases to the public.

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Nexus Line-up: Galaxy Nexus, Nexus 7 & Nexus Q

The icing on the cake came with the unveiling of the much rumored Nexus 7 Android tablet made by ASUS and priced at $199 in the Google Play Store. We can’t forget about the sexy orb Nexus Q home entertainment companion which allows you to use a phone or tablet to control the experience on your entertainment system.

Jelly Bean (Android 4.1) will be available mid July as an OTA update on the following devices: Motorola Xoom, Galaxy Nexus, Nexus S, (Nexus 7 comes stock with it), and open sourced for the developer community today at developer.android.com.

Tags: Android 4.1, Google I/O, Google Now, Jelly Bean, Nexus 7, Nexus Q, What's New in Jelly Bean Android 4.1

Categorised in: Apps Blog, Featured, News