Features Of New Android Jelly Bean

Google’s latest version of the Android OS is coming on mid-July. Named as Jelly Bean, the OS comes packed with many features and updates which was never available with others and which will make it a perfect competitor to iOS, Windows Phone and blackberry.

Here we list the top features you will come to experience in Jelly Bean.

Google Now

Google Now is one kind of a service, which is created to assist you every day by unifying all the information about you. It takes everything your Smartphone knows about you.

When you launch Google Now, you’ll see a list of various cards. These cards display how your day will be, as Google Now pays attention to everything including your usual route to work (including the time takes for journey), your calendar, travel plans, news you like to read and nearby places you might want to eat. From these information, Google Now creates an array of cards that explain that it’ll take 30 minutes to get to work if you take the usual bus route, or that you need to leave in ten minutes if you want to catch the flight. Everything within Google Now communicates with the other pieces.

What Google Now does is, it figures out the user based on search history, and give him everything a Smartphone owner normally get from the device to stay productive, but everything automatically.

So imagine this: you like to practice yoga around 1pm every day, but you happen to have a 2pm flight. Google Now knows that it’ll only take you 30 minutes to get to the airport, and that your flight has been delayed to 3:30pm. So it will let you know you have plenty of time to practice. 

Smart Keyboard

Well, everybody seems to avoid keyboard usage and shifted to voice type. Jelly Bean has a brilliant voice assistant, which works in device itself without the support of network. So users can simply type with their voice, even when they don’t have service.

Now we come to keyboard. Jelly Bean has an awesome predictive keyboard which allows you type a word or two, then based on what you’ve typed, it makes a few educated guesses on what your next word will be and offers them up as options before you’ve even started typing the next word.

Android Beam

Near Field Communication (NFC) takes a turn with Jelly Bean’s Android Beam. It was present in Ice Cream Sandwich, but failed to gain popularity. So Google has added a couple of new features to Android Beam which lets you share anything by just tapping your phone to any other NFC enabled Android Beam phone. It is now possible to automatically pair the NFC enabled Bluetooth devices like headphones and speakers by just tapping it with your phone.

 

Smart Widgets

Google makes the App section smart by introducing “improved App Widgets that can automatically resize, based on where the user drops them on the home screen, the size to which the user expands them, and the amount of room available on the home screen.” New App Widget APIs let you take advantage of this to optimize your app widget content as the size of widgets changes.

So the widgets in your Smartphone will become responsive.  If you drag and drop any widgets into the home page, the OS will manage home screen space by adjusting other icons and widgets to make space for new ones. Apple has not embraced widgets in iOS while Microsoft has taken a step towards it by creating customizable "live tiles" for Windows Phone. But they are still static boxes tied to a single home screen. Android's widgets are now smarter and will be easier to integrate on an Android's variety of home screens.

Easy App Updates

Updating your apps is going to be lot more easy with the Jelly Bean. This is how Google states it: “Smart app updates is a new feature of Google Play that introduces a better way of delivering app updates to devices. When developers publish an update, Google Play now delivers only the bits that have changed to devices, rather than the entire APK. This makes the updates much lighter-weight in most cases, so they are faster to download, save the device’s battery, and conserve bandwidth usage on users’ mobile data plan. On average, a smart app update is about 1/3 the size of a full APK update.”