Hasta La Gadget!

This week Android 4.1 Jelly Bean was introduced at Google I/O 2012, with a full update of your homescreen interface. This update will increase your ability to move elements around in several ways, with automatic moving of icons when they’re in the way, automatic resizing of widgets when they do not fit, and pushes back and forth in a much easier way. This update will come to the Samsung Galaxy Nexus first, and will be pushed ot the rest of the Android world soon.

This update to Jelly Bean includes elements from all around the Android device, including Bluetooth, accessibility, and language updates across the board. The camera has been boosted, there’s Voice Recognition offline, and more! Stick around all day and week to see all of our I/O 2012 action, and hit the timeline below for more Jelly Bean as well!

Jelly Bean boosts homescreen workability is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Google has added offline voice typing to Android 4.1 Jelly Bean, making the voice dictation system work even when your phone lacks a data connection. The company’s engineers had to shrink down the voice recognition engine significantly to make the system fit locally onto a phone, Google explained at IO today, meaning users will now no longer have to make sure they have a speedy data connection in order to take advantage of it.

In the on-stage demonstration, Google showed how a Galaxy Nexus running the new offline voice typing system in Jelly Bean could track a full sentence, transcribing it in seconds. In contrast, Apple’s voice recognition system in iOS – currently available on the iPhone 4S and new iPad – demands a web connection for the company’s servers to do the heavy crunching.

Offline voice typing will initially only be supported for US English, with Google planning to add further languages later on. Meanwhile there’s new Hebrew, Persian, Hindi and Thai language text support introduced in Jelly Bean.

Android 4.1 Jelly Bean adds Offline Voice Typing is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Ready for some crazy numbers straight out of Google I/O? Good, because they’re throwing them out thick and fast. Google has taken to the stage to announce that there have been a total of 400 million Android device activations across the world to date. That’s up from 100 million this time last year. In addition, one million Android devices are activated every day. That’s 12 devices every second.

That’s up from the 400,000 daily activations announced at last year’s Google I/O. In addition, the company showed a heat map of the world indicating the demand for Android devices. While Europe and North America showed green, yellow and red started to show in developing nations across Eastern Europe, South America, and Asia.

That should give you an idea of where Google and its Android partners intend to target next. Cheap devices should help with that, along with the lack of a license fee for the operating system. There’s more coming out of the I/O event every second, so stay tuned.

Google: 400m Android devices activated is written by Ben Kersey & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

As part of its unveiling of Android 4.1 Jelly Bean, Google has unveiled Project Butter, a major effort to squash Android’s frequent problems with device lag, as well as Systrace to help diagnose performance. Project Butter lets the CPU and graphics run in parallel, rather than crash into each other, and has a big impact on both real and perceived speed: the entire interface runs at 60 frames per second on sufficiently fast hardware. Graphics are now triple-buffered to keep scrolling and transitions humming along, and the processor will swing into full gear the moment you touch the screen to keep input lag to a minimum. Systrace, in the meantime, will help developers stamp out what performance hiccups remain. The tracing tool will be a part of the Jelly Bean SDK, so every coder can get an app running in tip-top shape.

Check out our full coverage of Google I/O 2012’s opening keynote at our event hub!

Project Butter improves Android 4.1’s speed to a silky-smooth 60FPS originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 27 Jun 2012 12:48:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The new version of Google’s Android operating system is called Android 4.1 Jelly Bean. It’s faster, has a cleaner home screen, a new camera app, much better notifications, and what could be a killer app: Google Now. This is what’s new in Jelly Bean: More »