Jellybean has been announced and should be arriving OTA in July for the Nexus+Xoom devices, so if you missed it here’s the massive differences!
Under the hood:
- Better Dev tools to find performance bottlenecks
- VSync
- Triple Buffering, increasing responsiveness!
Jellybean’s keyboard is getting a huge update to include some fancy features including
- Offline Voice Typing (that worked on stage! Take that Apple!)
- Predictive Keyboard which will hopefully take Android Stock Keyboard into the SwiftKey area of prediction!
- More languages! 18 in total!
- Improved support for Arabic and Hebrew.
- External Braile output
The camera app has been updated to include faster reviewing and shooting.
Notifications:
- You can take action on notifications inline! So, you can text someone who you just missed a call from in less taps. This should be available for all developers to use
- Quick responses from SMS messages in stock Messaging!
- Notifications no longer are stuck to a certain area, add photos and long lists in your notifications. This is great for developers, if used correctly! (Full page AirPush adverts are going to make me cry)
- Notifications can now have their own buttons on to take action, so you don’t need any custom ROMs to change tracks in the notification bar.
Google Search:
- Knowledge Graph, find facts quicker
- Much better design for it.
- Voice search (aka Siri but totally awesome)
Google Now:
- Learns from the data Google has on you
- Provides useful stuff such as the travel on your daily routine
- Public Transport info, Sports, Flights etc etc
- What’s going on in your day?
- Basically, it’s answering “What would a personal assistant that’s there 24/7 tell you to make your day better?” in a form of neat Stacks
- Google Doodles are only a slide down away (oh, and the search bar)
- As with everything, it learns and they’re improving it (sounds like Cloud based)
Other Google Apps:
- Google Plus/Maps Places – you can do actions like book tables etc
TTS got a huge update and sounds really natural now.
