To quote Google ‘Google Now gets you just the right information at just the right time‘. With Google Now, Google brings its power of Google Search to Android in a more enhanced and personalized way. Also, it takes on Apple’s Siri with a voice search feature. It also outwits Siri by not just passively replying your queries but also proactively ever ready to alert you at many events and needs. Its smartness relies in its ability to track flights, keep an eye on traffic and your calendar, check sports scores and keep tab on weather, look out for suggested places nearby etc and also alert you based on your location, time, likes and needs. Sounds a bit of some AI isn’t it? And you are alerted/suggested through google now ‘cards’ and you have many types of cards that would pop on your screen based on your preference. In short, Google is trying to get greedy here and trying to reduce your individual attention/need on apps like Yelp, FourSquare etc by giving one-stop solution.
To know more about Google Now. ClickHERE
Offline voice typing feature
This should easily be my favourite flavour of the Jelly Bean. Those with slow connections know how painful or irritating it would be while waiting for the server connection to enable the voice typing and you curse when it says ‘server error’ duh! The good news with Jelly Bean: Google’s voice-recognition service for text input has been enabled for offline use. Yay! So now you can dictate your heart out without having to get connected. One delicious feature isn’t it?!
Notifications center gets a face-lift
Android notifications has always impressed. Jelly Bean upgrade makes it more powerful and user-friendly. So now you can return a missed call or send a message directly from the notification pane, see emails, control certain apps and do more actions right from the notification pane making it easier as well as reducing the gestures required to perform an action.
Improvement in internal dictionary
Jelly Bean is supposed to have enhanced the internal dictionary options that aids you in predictive typing. So expect more word-completion options as well as when you tap on one of those suggested word, it will additionaly pop even more options for that particular word. Hmmmm… call me old fashioned but I don’t use predictive texting much.
Improvement to media gallery
To put it naively, it makes deleteing easier. Go to media gallery, pinch a photo and you can make it smaller. Once you do it, you will see all the images in film-strip mode and you can navigate through pictures by swiping left or right. Once here, if you have to get rid of unwanted pic, you just swipe it to the top of the screen.
Automatic widget-resizing
Too many cooks widgets spoils the page? Now the widget will automatically resize when you drop it into a crowded page. You can also make its size and shape by controlling the ‘nodes’.
Apart from these 6 enhancements / improvements / features , Jelly Bean also provides some performance improvements to experience a smoother and quicker usability. So now lets hope the taste of Jelly Bean arrives at your compatible devices faster and earliest too but judging by the past experience errm … well taste a jelly bean candy till then instead of keeping the fingers crossed!]]>
