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Android 4.1 Jelly Bean It's here, the next version of Android. So who will get it first? The Nexus 7 Tablet ships with Jelly Bean on board and Galaxy Nexus, the Motorola Xoom, and the Nexus S wil get it from mid july via over the air update. What's NEW? Fast & Smooth with Project Butter With buttery graphics and silky transitions. We put Android under a microscope, making everything feel fast, fluid, and smooth. Moving between home screens and switching between apps is effortless, like turning pages in a book. More reactive and uniform touch responses mean you can almost feel the pixels beneath as your finger moves across the screen. Jelly Bean makes your Android 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. To ensure a consistent framerate, Android 4.1 extends vsync timing across all drawing and animation done by the Android framework. Everything runs in lockstep against a 16 millisecond vsync heartbeat — application rendering, touch events, screen composition, and display refresh — so frames don’t get ahead or behind. 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. Android 4.1 reduces touch latency not only by synchronizing touch to vsync timing, but also by actually anticipating where your finger will be at the time of the screen refresh. This results in a more reactive and uniform touch response. In addition, after periods of inactivity, Android applies a CPU input boost at the next touch event, to make sure there’s no latency. Project Butter VIDEO Simple, beautiful and beyond smart - Expandable, actionable notifications. Android has always put you in control when it comes to staying notified and connected. Now you can take action directly from the notifications shade. Late for a meeting? Email everyone to let them know. Missed a call? Call them back in an instant. And because they’re expandable, you can get an even deeper look into the things that matter most, like multiple emails or photos on Google+. Notifications have long been a unique and popular feature on Android. Developers can use them to place important or time-based information in front of users in the notification bar, outside of the app’s normal UI. 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. Widgets work like magic. With Jelly Bean it’s now even easier to personalize your home screen. As you place widgets on the screen, everything else automatically moves to make room. When they’re too big, widgets resize on their own. Interacting with your favorite apps and customizing your home screen has never been easier. Seamlessly take and share photos. Android 4.0, Ice Cream Sandwich, made snapping photos super fast; Jelly Bean brings that same speed to the next step: viewing. Just swipe over from camera to filmstrip view to instantly view the photos you just took, and quickly swipe away the ones you don’t like. Now sharing--and bragging--are a breeze. A smarter keyboard. Android’s dictionaries are now more accurate, more relevant. The language model in Jelly Bean adapts over time, and the keyboard even guesses what the next word will be before you’ve started typing it. With improved text-to-speech capabilities, voice typing on Android is even better; it works even when you don’t have a data connection, so you can type with your voice everywhere you go. 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. Jelly Bean also adds support for accessibility plugins to enable external Braille input and output devices via USB and Bluetooth. Android Beam. With Android Beam on Jelly Bean you can now easily share your photos and videos with just a simple tap, in addition to sharing contacts, web pages, YouTube videos, directions, and apps. Just touch two NFC-enabled Android devices back-to-back, then tap to beam whatever's on the screen to your friend. Instantly pair your Android phone or tablet to Bluetooth devices like headsets or speakers that support the Simple Secure Pairing standard by just tapping them together - no more syncing or searching required. The new Google experience on Android The best of Google just got better on Android. The search experience in Jelly Bean has a new look-and-feel, and has faster and more natural Voice Search. And Google Now brings you just the right information, before you even ask. Google Now brings you just the right information at just the right time. Google Now tells you today’s weather before you start your day, how much traffic to expect before you leave for work, when the next train will arrive as you’re standing on the platform, or your favorite team's score while they’re playing. And the best part? All of this happens automatically. Cards appear throughout the day at the moment you need them. Google Now VIDEO A new look for Search. Android has search at its core. With Jelly Bean, a redesigned experience uses the power of the Knowledge Graph to show you search results in a richer way. It’s easier to quickly get answers and explore and browse search results. Voice Search. Sometimes you’d rather just speak your search query. Or just ask a question. Android lets you search the web with your voice, and it’s convenient for getting quick answers on the fly. It speaks back to you and is powered by the Knowledge Graph, bringing you a precise answer if it knows it, and precisely ranked search results, so you can always find out more. USB Audio USB audio output support allows hardware vendors to build hardware such as audio docks that interface with Android devices. Multichannel audio Android 4.1 supports multichannel audio on devices that have hardware multichannel audio out through the HDMI port. Multichannel audio lets you deliver rich media experiences to users for applications such as games, music apps, and video players. For devices that do not have the supported hardware, Android automatically downmixes the audio to the number of channels that are supported by the device (usually stereo). Android 4.1 also adds built-in support for encoding/decoding AAC 5.1 audio. App Encryption Starting with Android 4.1, Google Play will help protect application assets by encrypting all paid apps with a device-specific key before they are delivered and stored on a device. This is probably to stop piracy of paid apps. Most probably say goodbye to sharing a paid app in jellybean. Smart App Updates 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.