Android 4.1 Jelly Bean OS has been officially announced at Google I/O, coming in mid-July. Jelly Bean comes with a super awesome logo, which you see above. It brings some amazing new features including Project Butter for faster, smoother and more responsive UI, Offline Voice Input, automatically resizable widgets and more. Jelly Bean won’t get vast improvements as Ice Cream Sandwich did. Android 4.1 Jelly Bean is the next layer on top of the Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich OS.
Here are the highlights and best features of Jelly Bean Platform:
Project Butter
The main goal of the Android 4.1 Jelly Bean build is to bring the lag-free performance for Android OS powered devices. Project Butter represents a faster, smoother and more responsive UI. It brings triple buffering in the graphics pipeline, extended vsync timing and it allows animation up to 60fps. Jelly Bean makes apps more responsive, reducing touch latency and “anticipating where your finger will be at the time of screen refresh” and start drawing from that point to make the UI appear even smoother.
Project Butter has got a new feature called “Tooling” – it uses a new tool called Systrace, which uses Android’s Linux kernel to draw an overall picture of what’s happening on the system at any given moment, arranging time-series graphs representing happenings and allowing developers to “isolate rendering interruptions and other issues.”
Offline Voice Input, Keyboard and Google Now
Android 4.1 Jelly Bean brings revamped voice search with true voice-dictation capabilities and beautiful UI. Users are required to be connected to the cloud to be able to use it. Voice Typing can also be done in offline. So, you no longer need requires data connection to work. Accessibility has also been improved by adding new gestures and external support for Brail input.
Finally, Google has a viable answer to Apple’s Siri. They have also introduced a set of improvements called Google Now. It lets you to search for things and receive answers back as cards that have been built based on your search history. Cards will cover all things from Weather, Calendars, Places, Reminders, Navigation Routes you take often to Sports scores from your favorite teams.
Google has added voice playback option and you will also get advanced options such as time of day, location and previous searches complete with pictures, source citations.
Jelly Bean also brings improved keyboard typing with better and more accurate predictive input and extended dictionary.
Expandable and Actionable Notifications
The notification bar lets you know about the arrival of a new mail and it will give you some interactions with the item right from the notification shade. Right from the notification shade, you can answer, ignore, or hang up the incoming calls; you can access the Album art and music controls; and you can comment or re-share an image.
With the help of a two fingered swipe, you can expand or collapse the new notifications or even perform actions directly and no need to enter another app.
Automatically Resizable Widgets
Jelly Bean will resize the widgets you dropped on screen to fit the available space if the widget is bigger than the amount of space you have available. You can also flick them away easily.
# Android Beam – It lets you to share photos and videos with another device. You can can connect your NFC phone with NFC-ready Bluetooth devices just by tapping them.
# Jelly Bean lets you to use 720×720 resolution photos in your contacts.
# Jelly Bean brings a better HTML5 video experience with improved rendering speed, improved text input, better Javascript performance and more.
# Jelly Bean brings multichannel audio, better USB audio for docks, and audio chaining.
# Jelly Bean brings much more accurate network bandwidth management.
# Support for Kannada, Telugu, and Malayalam languages.
# Improved accessibility with new gestures and external support for Brail input.
Android 4.1 Jelly Bean will be rolled out fir Galaxy Nexus, Motorola Xoom and Nexus S devices in mid-July. Check out the full features of the Android 4.1 Jelly Bean here at developer website.
Source: Android