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Android 4.1 Jelly Bean Review

Posted by Soulskill on from the tastes-good-except-for-the-white-ones dept.

New submitter codysleiman points out a review of Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean) at The Verge. They say the look and feel of Google's mobile operating system has improved in a few different ways. Aesthetically, it isn't trying quite so hard as it did in Gingerbread and Ice Cream Sandwich, making the UI less of a distraction. While performance benchmarks aren't much different, Jelly Bean forces 60fps throughout and lets the GPU, CPU and display run independently, so it at least feels smoother and more responsive. Another big area of improvement is notifications: "You can tap a share button on photos, calendar appointments give you a snooze or email attendees option, missed calls provide direct call-back buttons. ... Google has introduced APIs for actions on notifications and I hope that app developers take advantage of them, because it would be nice to have more actions on a variety of different apps." The new on-screen keyboard also got some much-needed updates, and Google Now looks promising.

2 of 255 comments (clear)

  1. Re:A nice step forward by tlhIngan · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    Yes, I've tried to use Android up to and including honeycomb and found them pretty much unusuable. I mean, I try a Galaxy Tab 10.1 in the store, and I can't even swipe between pages on the home screen without stutter. And it's running on more powerful hardware than the (at the time) original iPad I had.

    Now that I've played with ICS a lot when it came out and am definitely very impressed - ICS fixed a LOT of issues with Android, and even though I like iOS, I can finally say ICS is a worthy competitor to iOS. Jelly Bean makes it even more so.

    Now the focus is on the apps - to not look like amateurish pieces of crap. Other than maybe a handful of Android apps (e.g., Dolphin Browser), most Android apps look horrible, and outside of that handful, the ones that look good are that way because they came from iOS.

  2. Re:Android = fail by freman · · Score: 1, Flamebait

    I got on the train this morning and saw half the carriage on their iphones doing what ever apple users do - I couldn't help but think, as I pulled out my android, "who's thinking different now bitches?"