Google has just unveiled some fascinating new details on Jelly Bean, the latest version of Android, at Google I/O, the company’s developer conference taking place in San Francisco this week.
The Android maker confirmed the Jelly Bean name earlier this week with a giant jelly bean sculpture at its Mountain View campus.
The launch comes just a couple weeks after the launch of iOS 6, Apple’s new and improved mobile OS at its San Francisco developer conference, WWDC.
Google detailed the extensive design work that went into Jelly Bean, an initiative the company calls Project Butter. Jelly Bean features tripe buffering in the Android graphics pipeline, and Vsync which keeps the frame rate consistent with your device’s display. The result is that just about everything in the new OS looks “buttery smooth.”
As expected, Google also unveiled its own Siri competitor for Jelly Bean, dubbed Google Now. The feature can handle basic trivia — someone asked it who’s the Prime Minister of Japan — but it can also give you directions.
The company confirmed that it will be releasing Jelly Bean in mid-July to the Galaxy Nexus, Nexus S, and Motorola Xoom tablet.
Jelly Bean’s predecessor was Ice Cream Sandwich, a mobile OS aimed at addressing many of the fragmentation concerns that have long plagued the Android ecosystem. By tailoring Ice Cream Sandwich to run on tablets, smartphones, and other types of devices, Google hoped to bring some much-needed unity to the ever-growing Android platform.
Ice Cream Sandwich, which was officially launched at last year’s Google I/O, has been slow to roll out to consumer devices; we expect the rollout for Jelly Bean to be similarly lethargic on the manufacturers’ part.
However, we will see one flagship device, developed in partnership with Google, that will run Jelly Bean from the start.
Developing, refresh for updates.
Filed under: dev, mobile
No comments:
Post a Comment