Gadgetory

hi this is dieter bowing to the verge and we are looking at Android 4.1 jelly bean on the Samsung Galaxy Nexus this is Google's update for this year and the first thing to note is that they spent a lot of time focusing on performance of something called project butter and in my experience with jellybean so far it really does make a big difference even on this relatively old hardware performance is way better than than I expected it doesn't doesn't seem to require a whole lot of power in order to get the benefit you can see that the the jellybean device is on the left here the Android 4.0 device is on the right and I'm getting you know much faster much smoother performance on the Galaxy Nexus with jellybean than I do with it on Android 4.0 Matias Duarte had said that Google had declared war on lag and it really shows here you can see in the browser that scrolling is much faster and smoother on jellybean the next thing that Google did with jellybean is it updated its notification area with a couple of really cool new features the first which I'm showing here as you can to finger scroll on any of your notifications to show more information and in addition to that on any particular notification you can tap on it and it will let you share or perform other actions unfortunately not every notification does this but a lot do and it's it's pretty cool you can see if there's a new sharing menu as well it shows up in most places but not all so it's it's really convenient to be able to peek in at what you're looking at and of course you can still swipe stuff away to dismiss it one interesting thing is if you long press on a notification you get a pop-up link for the app info which seems like a really strange thing except what it does is it takes you right into the app info where you can hit a checkbox to turn off notifications for that particular app which is really convenient feature if you've got an app that's just bugging the heck out of you you can just turn off notifications for it the homescreen and jellybean has been very slightly updated when you try and put a widget on a screen it will automatically shift around the other stuff on that screen to make space for the widget and if the widget resizes it will also automatically resize the widget you can also push icons around in the same way you could just swipe up to dismiss it instead of dragging it of course the headline feature for jellybean is Google now which you can launch either by swiping up from the home button or directly from the lock screen if you don't have a security lock engaged and what it does is it shows you a ambient information based on stuff that you search for on Google so for example here it knows that I care about the twin score it knows that I care about the weather and it has that stuff pop up automatically as I go throughout my day it also can show local stuff as well and you can tap on any of these cards get more information for example here it took me directly into maps and into the the information for that particular shop you can of course swipe cards away to the right to get rid of them and sometimes when you do it lets you know that there are settings for that particular card and so this is letting you know that places will pop up when you are near them on most cards you can tap on a little three dot thing to bring up particular settings for it and basically you do get you know different settings per card but you're not going to be able to directly control cards you can't move them up and down manually but you can set a priority which will make it more or less likely that it shows up at any particular time so while there are quite a lot of settings that you can dig through to try and customize your experience in Google now you're not really meant to it's meant to just sort of look at what you're searching for with with Google search and figure out where you live where you're going what your flights are you know what your favorite sports teams are and just bubble that stuff up as it makes sense to you throughout the day and in my testing it definitely got better over time you know it took quite a while for it to learn where I live and it took a while for it to figure out where I work and you know what buses I do and don't care about but eventually it started to be really clever at showing me bus schedules when I'm waiting at a bus stop or of course you know showing me the twin score when it popped up the other feature about Google now is it does voice search and it's not really a series you can still perform a few actions on the device but frankly nothing more than was there on Android 4.0 and you know it it's not as intelligent at Siri at understanding natural language questions you you want to type in a search directly but it can do stuff like hear get directions and when you do choose you know if you want to bike or walk or whatnot and there's also a action bar that drags across and it's a little timer bar and you know if you just wait for it and do nothing it'll jump right in direction so let's switch mics and try out a couple voice searches here launch Google Talk what is my next appointment who is the President of the United States Google American Airlines 1921 Minnesota Twins so as you could see Google now isn't quite as good at natural language and can't quite directly adjust stuff on the device itself but it does present you with Google search if it doesn't have a card for you which can still be convenient and pull up information directly there are a bunch of categories of cards here we can take a look at the sample cards to see what is on offer traffic weather sports location stuff public transit flights next appointment currency and a few more and the important thing to note is Google says they're going to be offering more as time goes on another new thing in jellybean is an updated keyboard that has a predictive typing it is able to guess what your next word is and auto correct your current word and it does quite a good job it's a it's a bit like SwiftKey although it's not as aggressive at putting in at suggestions but you can type whatever you like in and it'll take a shot at it and you can jump up to hit the word that you would like to guess you can also dig into settings on the keyboard and choose how aggressively you would like Google to predict your next word while you're in settings you're definitely I want to check out the personal dictionary which will allow you to add shortcuts so you can type in a short key combo like we'll say Kimmy shelter and we can assign that to just a very short key combo and then if you're back in any app where you've got the keyboard up and loaded you can just type that shortcut and one of your autocorrect suggestions will be the thing that you programmed in one last text input option is offline dictation if you don't have a cell signal you can still use your voice to type messages in and as with the Android 4.0 it will show your text as you type and I found that it's not quite as accurate offline as it is online but it's pretty close so let's take a listen however it does seem pretty darn good I guess I can't complain Google also made some minor changes around the rest of the OS one of them is the camera app which it still is relatively fast and you can take photos by tapping the blue dot but instead of having to tap the little thumbnail up in the upper right hand corner after you take some photos you can just swipe to the left and get into a filmstrip view of all of your pictures and you can pinch out to take a look at all of them together and you can swipe them up to get rid of them there's an undo button if you accidentally delete something you don't want to delete it's a feature we've seen on other smartphones and it's nice to see that Google has added it to jellybean face unlock and jellybean is also faster and more reliable than it was an Ice Cream Sandwich which is really nice they've also added a new feature called liveness check which we'll watch to see you blink so you won't be able to hold a photo up to the camera in order to unlock it which i suppose is a nice security feature just turn it on blink and it'll unlock I should also add that Google has added talkback to jelly bean which is an accessibility option that reads out everything on the screen and you can tap to have it read out what's under your thumb DoubleTap to select it it's great for the sight-impaired but if that doesn't describe you you obviously aren't going to want to use it Google Maps also got an update although it's not exclusive to jellybean users if you're on Ice Cream Sandwich or even Gingerbread you'll be able to use this feature it's out now it's making maps available offline you just go to the map area that you want to save pan around and it will work offline it caps out at around 80 megabytes now you know area which is a little bit less than I would like but it's still a good feature to have if you have limited connectivity where you live or where you're going and that's Android 4.1 jelly bean it's a mix of really great performance enhancements that brings it up to par with other smartphone platforms it's Google now which I find to be an ambitious experiment but not quite ready for something to depend on every day but I expect it will improve over time and a mortgage board of other features which fill out the platform and make it feel a bit more intuitive I especially like the the notification options those are really great it's coming to the Galaxy Nexus the Nexus S and the Motorola Xoom in July unfortunately we have no idea when other Android smartphones or tablets will see this operating system update hopefully it's soon but of course that's going to be up to manufacturers to decide