NoGramming – Mehring
Ice Cream Sandwich VS Jelly Bean
Everyone knows Ice Cream Sandwich (Android 4.0) was a big step in the right direction for the android mobile operating system. Google has not begun developing and release the 4.x versions of Android. Update 4.1 is knows as Jelly Bean; while 4.2 does not have an official nickname yet. The differences between jelly bean and Ice Cream Sandwich are substantial in some areas and nonexistent in other. It is clear that it is as big an overhaul as Ice Cream Sandwich was to its predecessors. There are a few main areas that difference can be detected.
The first area that is difference is overall sleep of the operating system. The user interface looks almost exactly the same, but jelly bean has a smoother/faster feel to it. Jelly Bean also can load apps, web pages and switch to a new screen faster than Ice Cream Sandwich. While it is not exactly clear how Google achieved this, I believe that they simply gave the UI a higher (or lower if you are linux) priority is the process ques. They also increased the speed of the Camera app so accessing photos is substantially faster.
The next area that they improved was the notification feature. Again, speed has been increased over Ice Cream so there is less lag after the user attempts to drag down the notification bar. They also removed some of the clutter on the notification bar, making it easier to use and more simplistic. They also added functionality that allows users to interact with apps, which are running in background, without actually launching the UI for those apps. This is a big part of the speed increase because you never have to leave the notification dropdown screen to complete the task you want to do. Another feature is you can enable or disable notification privileges for apps in the app management page.
Google also changed how widgets work on the screen. The added the feature that any widget, yes any widget, is resizable. When you place the widget the OS will also move apps underneath where you put it around so you can place it there. This is in contracts to Ice Cream where it just tells you that you cannot place that there.
They also had a major overall of the Google search app/widget. For starters, the way they display the results is much more mobile friendly, compared the standard results page on computers. It will give you a quick page of what it things you want to know, and if one of the windows it gives you is not what you want you can always go and look at the standard Google view for the results. The voice command part of search is also much faster than ICS. There are numerous reports that it is as good, and even some say its better, than Siri for IPhone and IOS. It is clear that this was a focus of Google. I imagine as soon as they heard about Siri they started working hard on matching it, and in Jelly Bean they finally caught her. I expect 4.2+ updates to clearly surpass Siri and leave her in the dust.
There are some of the changes from Ice Cream Sandwich (4.0) to Jelly Bean (4.1). While most are minor changes it is clearly another step in the right direction for Google in winning the Mobile OS war. Especially when you think how much better IOS use to be compared to Android back in the 1.x and 2.x days. I am personally excited to get Jelly Bean on my phone (Galaxy SIII through Sprint) in a month or two.