Android 4.1 Jelly Bean: All you need to know

New Delhi: Android 4.1, codenamed "Jelly Bean," is the latest version of Android, which was announced by Google at its fifth annual developer conference - Google I/O 2012. Adding new features to the latest version of Android, Google claims to have made improvements throughout the platform. Google previewed it at a conference in San Francisco.

Let's see what all Google's latest Android operating system - Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean) has to offer.

1. Faster ways to search content on the Internet and share photos between two phones are promised in the next version of Google's Android operating system for mobile devices.

2. Google has also added offline voice typing to Android 4.1 Jelly Bean, thereby making the voice dictation system work even when your handset lacks an Internet connection.

3. One of the new features in Android will be Google Now, which is supposed to get you the right information at the right time automatically, if you activate the feature. If you say "traffic," for example, it will look at your usual commute to work and show you alternative routes if there's a lot of traffic. It will tell you the scores of your favourite sports teams automatically, and it will keep you up to date on the status of your flights if you're traveling.

4. Jelly Bean will also come with the ability to share photos by tapping two phones together, using an emerging wireless technology called near-field communications. The current version of Android, Ice Cream Sandwich, has limited ability to share data through NFC. Samsung Electronic Co.'s new Galaxy S III phone has a feature for sharing photos and video by tapping, but it works only with other S III phones.

5. The new Android also promises a smarter keyboard, with a feature for predicting your next word before you type.

6. Notifications have long been a unique and popular feature on Android. Android 4.1 brings a major update to the Android notifications framework. Apps can now display larger, richer notifications to users that can be expanded and collapsed with a pinch. Notifications support new types of content, including photos, have configurable priority, and can even include multiple actions.

7. Android 4.1 introduces 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.

8. Android 4.1 is optimised to deliver Android's best performance and lowest touch latency, in an effortless, intuitive UI. To ensure a consistent framerate, Android 4.1 extends vsync timing across all drawing and animation done by the Android framework.

9. Android 4.1 also adds triple buffering in the graphics pipeline, for more consistent rendering that makes everything feel smoother, from scrolling to paging and animations.

10. Jelly Bean will be available in mid-July. Some devices - the Galaxy Nexus, Motorola Xoom and Nexus S - will get it automatically as an over-the-air update. Google's new tablet computer, the Nexus 7, will also come with Jelly Bean. 

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