Android 4.1 Jelly Bean: New Features

Hi there, this is Aryansh and in this post I'm gonna tell you about the new features in Android Jelly Bean OS.

 Android Jelly Bean is a Major Update over the Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich). There are a lot of new features like the Unlocking Screen has improved, due to the Butter Project your phone will become a lot smoother, there is a search surprise, and to know more, Read More.

Android toy with Jelly Beans around

Unlock Screen

The first thing that I would like to tell is that the Unlock screen has now been improved and now it has three icons, The Camera, Home and Google Now(new feature added by Google, will talk about it later. And there is a new backside texture in the unlock screen which looks good. And yeah, there is a new animation in the lock icon which follows your finger, its a pretty nice animation.

Project Butter 

 In earlier versions of Android we have seen the device lag almost every time we changed the screens or when scrolling through the Apps in the menu, but now we won't. Almost every device before Android 4.0 (ICS) had this device lag problem no matter how fast the CPU was, even in the Android 4.0 some phones which don't have a proper GPU faced this problem and to Android fanatics this was a major con. Now with Android 4.1, Jelly Bean, you won't find any lag while scrolling through the menu or screens. This has been made possible by Google's Project Butter. Jelly Bean makes the GPU and the CPU run simultaneously, rather than just getting banged with each others work. It runs at 60 FPS, that's right, 60 FPS which makes your phone ultra smooth. Also the graphics are now triple - buffered which makes the scrolling, rendering, and transitions smooth as Butter. The processor will run into full swing as soon as you'll touch the phone to keep the lag out.

Notifications 

The notifications slider, or whatever you may call it, has been greatly improved. The date date and time can be seen at the top. All the notifications come to one place, For eg, you get a Facebook message or an Email, you can just slide down the notifications thing and you'll get a preview of the Email. And it is very nice if you get a lot of Emails and stuff like that. You can swipe it if you want to just remove it and if you have many notifications there is an icon at the top right corner by which you can just remove all at once.

Google Now 

This is a new feature in this Jelly Bean Update and we haven't seen this feature before in Previous Versions of Android and I don't think that anybody had any idea about this thing coming in the Jelly Bean. We can access this feature by clicking over the Google search bar or if you have a device that has the three Android buttons on the screen you can just drag the home button to the screen and the Google Now thong will pop out on its own. It is basically a card based system and is an integration of search and voice(It is not Siri, don't get confused). You can just talk to the phone now and you can set up the cards by yourself. It shows the results in cards generally and you can ask some simple questions like, "What is the weather outside?" and others like that. Unlike Siri it has a very natural voice now and not that abhorrent robotic voice. Although we can't ask it questions like "Do you love me?" or "What is the meaning of life?" in these cases it will just pop out the Google search Results. We can also do the basic mathematical calculations, set alarms, etc.

Voice Typing

Another feature that has been improved is the Voice Typing. This feature was improved before in the Ice Cream Sandwich too but it has been improved a lot more now and now it understands most of the things said in almost every accent. The accuracy rate I would say is 90% and it is ideal for short messages that are generally in templates. It works in both, the online mode as well as offline mode. Although the accuracy drops down to 60% or so in offline mode, I would say that it is still better than ICS.


Widgets Manipulation

This is another new feature added by Google in this update. We can easily put our widgets anywhere we like and we can also resize them as to our liking. According to me it is a very nice feature for users who don't want a jargon of big-big widgets on their home screen or for those who want their favourites on the screen but they don't want them to be too big or too small. The widgets even auto-resize according to the space that is around if they are too big.

That's it for now....
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