Google has revealed their new Jelly Bean 4.1 OS which is the next layer on top of their Ice Cream Sandwich.The announcement was made at a Google Developers Conference in San Francisco where Hugo Barra, Director of Android Product Development said “Last year we announced Android across 100M devices. Now there are 400M android devices. last year 400K new Android devices were activated everyday. Now, 1M new Android devices activated every day.”
The new OS has better touch responsiveness a new and improved Vsync, offering triple buffering and delivers an improved user experience claims Google executives.
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It also has a new predictive keyboard and offline voice typing.
Barra also said “People spend a lot of time on the home screen with Android. To that end, Jelly Bean offers a much improved user experience when interracting with and customising the home screen”
During the event Engineering director Dave Burke showed “Project Butter,” which is designed to make the interface faster and smoother. The use of Vsync has been introduced to improve the frame rate of the video display, triple buffering, and deliver improvements to touch responsiveness he said.
Notifications have been extended so they can expand and collapse, and allow actions to happen directly from the notification. For instance, you can dial directly from notifications, see a preview of your email, or send an email directly from a calendar request. You can see and share information directly from Google+ or Foursquare, or see items within Pulse. I thought this looked quite good.
Barra showed a demo of other improved user interface items, including easier movement and automatic resizing of icons and widgets on the home screens, and improvements in the keyboard, including a new predictive keyboard.
There is also new camera features including a new film strip view that lets you quickly view all of your photos and new gestures for viewing and deleting photos. The Android Beam feature, which uses NFC to let users transfer content, has been extended to support photos and video. It will now pair with an NFC-enabled Bluetooth device. Other features incorporate new input languages, including Arabic and Thai, and new accessibility tools, like better Braille support.
