Jelly Bean another feather to Android's crown
It's been just over a month since Google officially announced the latest version of Android operating system code named Jelly Bean. The latest Android OS implements new technology from Google's 'Project Butter' to enhance performance and visuals, along with a new search experience. Already the latest flavor of Android has been installed on 0.8% of Android devices in the market, according to the search giant Google. Let's have a brief look into some of the new features of this latest OS. Jelly Bean is smoother than its predecessors, thanks to Google's 'Project Butter' feature. Do not get confused with its name. Project Butter has nothing to do with dairy products; rather it makes Jelly Bean run butter-smooth. With the triple-buffered graphics environment Jelly Bean gives android devices a better fluid user experience to its user. It lets the CPU and graphics run faster and has a big impact on both real and perceived speed on sufficiently fast hardware. One of Jellybean's awesome features is its advanced predictive keyboard. It is a great blessing for the lazy users. The keyboard not only does auto complete, but also predicts the next few words or phrase based on what you are typing out. This feature predicts the next couple of words using contextual analysis. Also, with its offline Voice Command feature you can dictate a text message without any data connection at all. In addition to predictive input, user also gets the chance to customise the keyboard design depending on language preference for better typing experience. Though the user dictionary does not work in its current version, the prediction and auto-correction is much more improved. Android notifications have always been awesome. Jelly Bean brings richer notifications that can be expanded or collapsed with a simple gesture. Now developers can make better use of this vital area of the user interface with new APIs of Jelly Bean. The increased size of the notifications along with some built-in apps makes reading easier for the user. Users who are time-cautious can find current time, days of the week at top left of the screen. The advanced notification features allow you to set alarm or email directly from the notification list. With help of Google Now, Jelly Bean acts as an intelligent and smart personal assistant of its users. Google Now is Google's answer to iPhone's Siri, which has definitely thrown a strong challenge to its competitor. Google Now suggests various useful information such as which dish you should have at a restaurant based on your GPS location. It can also be an immensely useful tool to help users keep up with their schedules. For example, it keeps user updated with flight status of upcoming flight and even tells what time he/she needs to leave from current location to catch the flight on time plus shows the traffic info. Users can also ask questions such as 'How tall is the Eiffel Tower?' To which it will present an attractive card with your answers. All in all users will now find a true virtual assistant in their latest Android phone through Google Now. With all the exciting features for the end users, Jelly Bean has not made developers unhappy. Starting with Jelly Bean, Google Play will help protect application assets by encrypting all paid apps with a device-specific key before they are delivered and stored on a device. Smart app updates is another new feature of Google Play that introduces a better way of delivering app updates to devices. When developers publish an update, Google Play delivers only the bits that have been changed to the devices, rather than the entire APK. This makes the updates more light-weight on Jelly Bean compare to other versions, so they are faster to download. Eventually this feature will be integrated to previous Android versions. Google is planning to help developers by integrating Google services such as authentication and Google+ into their apps delivered through Google Play. Android 4.1 Jelly Beans is the fastest and smoothest version of Android yet. And it should dominate the android devices with its advanced features, as a massive range of devices manufactured by different companies run on Android platform.
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