Android 4.1 "Jelly Bean"

4.1 "Jelly Bean"

Announced at 2012's Google I/O conference, Android 4.1 Jelly Bean is arguably a much bigger deal than its mere 0.1 increment over Ice Cream Sandwich would have you believe. It represents both a reboot in Google's flagging tablet strategy (having been introduced alongside the Asus-sourced Nexus 7) and a big refinement in the completely redesigned user experience that debuted in Android 4.0.

A quick glance at 4.1 — starting with the home screen — doesn't give you much indication that anything has changed, but a deeper look reveals a host of tweaks and new features. And one of its most important features is under the hood, away from view: "Project Butter." Google says that it set out to significantly improve Android's visual and touch performance with this version by triple-buffering graphics, locking all drawing to a 16-millisecond refresh time, and making a number of tweaks to the touch input subsystem. Since Android's launch, the platform has always seemed to lag iOS's touch responsiveness by a hair (particularly when scrolling) and these changes help close the gap.

Here's a small selection of 4.1's other headline features:

Roboto refresh. Android's signature font, first seen in Android 4.0, has been reworked. New styles and weights are used throughout the UI (italic is seen in Google Now, for instance) and the font renders a little differently than it did before.

Expandable, "actionable" notifications. Android has long had the best and most flexible notification system in the business (with webOS arguably the exception) and Android 4.1 takes it to the next level. Developers can now create more dynamic notifications that can expand right inside the notification drowdown to reveal more information and controls without opening the app itself. Notifications can also now be toggled off on an app-by-app basis, a useful feature first introduced by Apple with the debut of the Notification Center in iOS 5.

Widget flexibility. Resizable home screen widgets first came to the platform in Android 3.1, but Jelly Bean makes them more useful -— they can resize dynamically. The task of trying to fit all your widgets and icons on a single panel is a notoriously frustrating one, but now, widgets will adjust to fit the available space. Icons will also move out of the way to accommodate your drop target, much as they do in iOS.

Predictive text. Google has aggressively refreshed Android's stock keyboard with almost every new version of the platform (an effort that is largely lost because OEMs almost universally choose to replace it with their own), and 4.1 is no different. This time, focus has turned away from word correction and towards word prediction, a capability made famous by the widely popular SwiftKey and adopted by BlackBerry 10: the keyboard will now attempt to guess the next word that you want to write and adapt to your writing style over time.