Google has unveiled the next major version of their mobile operating system, the Android Jelly Bean. The company is version it as 4.1 instead of 5.0, this time for this update.
Google’s Hugo Barra, took stage to unveil the next major version of Android at Google I/O this year, and the first thing he discussed was about the all new Project Butter, followed by improved Notifications, improved keyboard prediction, smarter home screen, offline voice typing, accessibility, enhanced camera app, improved Android Beam and finally, Google Now!
Let’s take a quick look at these improvements that came out for Android Jelly Bean.
Project Butter:
Hugo was pretty excited about the new Project Butter, which is an enhancement to the current fluidity of Android. Android has always lacked that fluidity when it came to smooth animations and smooth transitions. But with Android Jelly Bean, its no more. The company has come up with a solution to while away this lag when a user scrolls across a list in his device.
The Project Butter makes use of three technologies: Vsync, Triple Buffering and Touch Responsiveness. And it feels a lot more better than Android behaved previously. The Project Butter also makes use of the hardware, and projects all the renderings at 60fps, giving the user a very smooth scrolling effect and animations across the device. The new architecture actually increases the CPU’s processing speed, every time a OS detects a touch. So Hugo was like, “You control your CPU at your fingertips!”
Hugo also showed a video of Project Butter, where they shot the effect of Project Butter on Android Jelly Bean and another device running Ice Cream Sandwich, and the results were pretty amazing. Here’ s the video that I was talking about:
Enhanced Notifications:
This was another improvement that many loved watching at Google I/O. The all new Android Jelly Bean comes with actionable notifications. The Notifications are now more detailed and is packed with information and actions across the device. Right from Gmail messages to Google+ Notifications, users can perform actions like reply to email, or snooze a calendar notification or even place and end a call right from the Notifications.
Improved Keyboard with Predictive Text:
Android now brings predictive keyboard to all the devices starting with Jelly Bean. The user’s next word would be predicted before even he starts typing depending on various vector calculations. This is a pretty good addition to the OS and we need to wait until we get our hands-on with this new Keyboard.
Offline Dictation:
Google said: “Voice dictation doesn’t have to be done online anymore.” And once they said it, there was a demo, showcasing offline dictation. But wait, how could this be possible? Where are the algorithms stored? And how does the system detect our voice and convert it as text in real-time? Well, Google answered this too. The company has managed to compress the entire Speech Recognition engine that runs on Data Centers into the OS, bringing offline dictations.
This is still limited, but its good to see that dictations can be done offline! The demo proved to be worth it.
Smarter Home Screen:
The Jelly Bean now has a smarter home screen with auto adjusting home screen widgets and also much improved icon management. The widgets now re-arrange and adjust automatically, to make maximum use of the smartphone’s screen.
Enhanced Camera App:
The Jelly Bean also brings some good improvements to the existing Camera app. The app is now faster and snappier in detecting things on screen. Just like how iOS users have, the Jelly Bean users can now swipe across the screen to view the latest photo you’ve clicked on the device.
But if you need to delete a photo, just toss it up to delete. And interestingly, you also have an undo option to bring back the photo you just deleted!
Improved Android Beam:
Android Beam enables used to share information via NFC, and it was a pretty good feature when it came to Android 4.0. But with the latest Android Jelly Beam, Google has improved sharing with Android Beam. The users can now share photos and videos by just tapping it with another NFC enabled device. And also, pairing can now happen securely with just a tap installed of the process that Bluetooth uses!
Jelly Bean optimized Google Search and Improved Voice Search:
Starting with Jelly Bean, Google is bringing some customized UI to Google Search for Android users. The search results now makes use of the Knowledge Graph which came to the public some months ago. And also, the voice support for Google Search has now improved so much and behaves more like how Siri on iPhone and iPad behaves. The users will not see a sheet of results and tossing it apart will reveal some more detailed information about the users’ search query.
Google Now:
This was something that Hugo and his team was excited about. The Google Now is your smart search assistant, that scales across the OS. The Google Now has got deep integration into the OS with a learning algorithm, which learns about you and your personal information to help you perform day-to-day actions.
Google Now brings all the on-the-go activities like your flight timings, and how long it would take for you to work out in the gym and board your flight, and how far you are from the airport, and much more information like these. Moreover, if you have a casual meeting to attend, Google Now is going to be suggesting you some places nearby to make the meeting memorable.
Here’s a demo video of Google Now:
Covering up:
Despite Google Now, Improved Dictation and more functional Notifications, Google’s update to Android is not pretty exciting and laid our expectations low. We wished there were more feature additions to Jelly Bean. But the UI changes all across the OS is a welcoming change and its going to get better and beautiful over the years.
Availability:
The Jelly Bean’s PDK is now available for the developers across the world. But the OS will start rolling out to Galaxy Nexus, Nexus S and Motorola Xoom in mid-july!