So Jelly Bean’s coming – in July, to be exact, for the Nexus S, Galaxy Nexus and Motorola Xoom – but what’s there to get excited about here?
A lot! But it’s actually more about improvements than anything else.
Jelly Bean is primarily a minor update, which explains why there isn’t as much fanfare accompanying it as did last year’s Ice Cream Sandwich, which was a major update. Don’t get me wrong, there’s some new stuff here too, like Google Now, the offspring of Google’s unified privacy policy initiative, which aims to provide a more personalized experience.
But most of it is about improving on Ice Cream Sandwich. Voice Search, for instance, can now be used offline.
Notifications, for its part, is now expandable here and has been souped up with action options, while Android Beam has also been improved to make connecting to NFC devices a breeze.
And last, but certainly not the least, Jelly Bean offers up faster and smoother over-all performance thanks to Project Butter. Tech-speak aside, this is Google’s latest innovation to help drastically improve performance on Android devices.
Just how fast is Jelly Bean?
Check out this video of Ice Cream Sandwich going head-to-head with Jelly Bean to see for yourself just how fast and buttery smooth Android 4.1 is compared to its predecessor:
It’s all good, but still, at the end of the day, it’s all a question of which features won’t get cut by phone makers once they roll out the Jelly Bean update to qualified Android phones. I’m hoping it won’t be much.
