One of the other big news stories of the day that comes along with the Nexus 7 is the tablet's OS itself, Android 4.1/Jelly Bean. Just as we predicted, this turned out to be an incremental upgrade to 4.1, rather than a full blown new version upgrade to 5.0. From what Google shared, there are quite a few new improvements and enhancements, so it isn't just a patch either. We took some pretty good notes on the changes in the new OS and of course we love to share, so here you go:
Project Butter -
- Designed to greatly improve frame-rate and make the UI smoother and faster
- Uses triple buffering and an enhanced vsync to 60 FPS
- Improves everything, from scrolling and browsing to animations and more
- Also creates a more reactive and improved touch response
- Includes a power-saving measure that dials back a device’s CPU to a lower frequency and then ramps up when a user touches the screen
- It's a benchmark-like tool designed to help developers scientifically pinpoint performance problems in database or code
- Designed to help developers optimize their UI
- Widgets align and resize automatically and make room for each other when moving them around
- New Vibrant and dynamic predictions algorithm improves predictive typing
- Google's Speech Recognizer now shrunk and integrated into Android directly
- It now fits on your Android so you can do offline voice activations and offline voice typing without having to rely on the online servers
- 18 new languages have been added
- Support for Braille optimized search engine
- Users more quickly swipe through pictures
- Delete pics quickly and easily with a swipe gesture
- Improved Undo to bring back deleted pics
- Film strip view for recently taken pics to easily check them out
- NFC-equipped devices can now tap each other to transmit pics or even video
- You can pair two NFC enabled devices with a tap as well
- Pair your smartphone with any other NFC equipped device with a simple tap
- More info available and displayed in your notifications
- The notifications are now actionable allowing you to call or email others directly from the notification screen
- Notifications are expandable and collapsable and customizable
- You can check in or share pics or share music right from your notifications
- Developers can create their own styles with up to three actions in a single notification
- You can long-press notifications for additional options - display information about the sender, or "optionally disable further notifications from the app."
- Uses an enhanced Knowledge Graph to database the answers to questions
- Has a new improved and faster UI - shows data cards based upon your questions
- Includes a more natural voice search and uses search history and location history to more accurately predict what you want
- Can help keep track of travel times to make meetings and appointments easier to schedule and keep
- Can keep you updated with flight, congestion and other travel info
- Can send out notifications to users telling you when to leave in order to make a meeting based on their location and traffic conditions
- Seems like a more "useful" and less gimmicky Siri-like assistant
Source: Google I/O
