What's New Android 4.1, Jelly Bean

Jelly Bean, is the fastest and smoothest version of Android yet. Jelly Bean improves on the simplicity and beauty of Android 4.0, and introduces a new Google search experience on Android.

• Everything in Jelly Bean feels fast, fluid, and smooth. Moving between home screens and switching between apps is effortless, like turning pages in a book.
• Jelly Bean features improved performance throughout the system, including faster orientation changes, faster responses when switching between recent apps, and smoother and more consistent rendering across the system through vsync and triple buffering.
• Jelly Bean has more reactive and uniform touch responses, and makes your device even more responsive by boosting your device's CPU instantly when you touch the screen, and turns it down when you don't need it to improve battery life.

What's New in Jelly Bean

Accessibility

• With Jelly Bean, blind users can use 'Gesture Mode' to reliably navigate the UI using touch and swipe gestures in combination with speech output.
• With the new accessibility focus feature, you can move a cursor between controls to maintain a target for the next action or a source for the next navigation event. You can double tap anywhere to launch the current item with accessibility focus.
• Text traversal in accessibility now gives you more control – choose to move between pages, paragraphs, lines, words or characters.
• TalkBack, a screenreader for Android, now supports gestures to trigger actions, to navigate applications, and traverse text.

Android Beam

• With Android Beam, you can now easily share your photos and videos.
• Instantly pair your phone or tablet to Bluetooth® devices like headsets or speakers that support the Simple Secure Pairing standard by just tapping them together

Google Now

Google Now brings you just the right information at just the right time. Cards appear throughout the day at the moment you need them, and appear as a notification when they're important.

• Weather card: When you start your day, Google Now shows weather for your current location and work.
• Traffic card: Get traffic conditions and alternate routes before you leave home or work.
• Transit card: When you're near a bus stop or a subway station, this card shows you what buses or trains are next.
• Places card: When you're on the go, Google Now will suggest nearby bars, restaurants, and places of interest.
• Flight card: See flight delays and traffic conditions to the airport for flights you've recently searched for.
• Sports card: You can see live scores and upcoming games and also buy game tickets on the fly.
• Currency card: When you're traveling, quickly check the local conversion rate.
• Translation card: When you're in a foreign country, you can quickly translate words into the local language.

Source: Android

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Google Now at newly launched landing page

What do we want? Google Now. When do we want it? Google…now. Easily one of the coolest features shown off as part of Android’s Jelly Bean update, the system of smart cards is designed to learn about the location and search habits of users in order to create automatically updated tiles of information that are available at the touch of a finger. The idea is that Google will answer your question before you even have it.

What’s the score to the game? Google Now knows your favorite team and keeps you updated. How long will the commute to work take? Again, Google Now predicts where you are headed and when you will be going to offer route advice. Those are just a couple examples of what the service can do, and if it is half as cool as it sounds on paper it is sure to become a mainstay of the Android OS. In case you need a refresher on just what Now is all about, Google has launched a landing page to provide a few more details. And then ask yourself the question: Google Now or Google Big Brother?
[via Google]

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