Google Spills Beans Over Jelly Bean (Android 4.1) & Slips Project Butter With It

At the Google I/O 2012 conference yesterday, Google released the next version of its Android OS called 'Jelly Bean' aka Android 4.1. We will see the release of this in mid-July. With that they have launched 'Project Butter' which is supposed to make the touch-experience on Jelly Bean buttery smooth. This has been made possible by increasing the frame rate to 60 FPS, and implementing vsync and triple buffering to make the screen more responsive than you can imagine. Google demonstrated the difference between Jelly Bean and ICS by running them both at the same time and the attendees could clearly see the Jelly Bean was a lot faster. (See video below.) Developers watching the Jelly Bean SDK will also have access to a new tool called systrace that displays what the rendering engine is up to.



Apart from that, Jelly Bean will bring you Sharper Notifications. That means slide down notifications will let you find all the things in one place. If you have missed a call, you can text or call back that contact directly from the notification widget. Same goes for Gmail messages, users never have to switch between apps. Then we have, Google Now, a voice assistant giving direct competition head-on to Apple’s Siri. Google Now will tell you which restaurant to pick or which route to take while walking or when you have a meeting.

With Android Beam, Jelly Bean will have support for Near Field Communication (NFC) capabilities, so users just have to hold their devices together to share photos, videos, etc. Users will see a Smarter Keyboard with text prediction capability and the Camera app has also been updated with a much faster way to review photos.

Doesn't that all sound great, but when does the update roll out for us all? Google will begin their OTA updates to the Galaxy Nexus, Nexus S, and Motorola Xoom in the middle of July, and SDK is available now to the developers. How do you like it? Share with us in comments.

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