Android 4.2, Jelly Bean

Android 4.2, Jelly Bean improves on the speed and simplicity of Android 4.1 and includes all new features – Photo Sphere and a completely redesigned camera app, new Gesture Typing keyboard, Google Now with all new cards, and much more.

Everything in Jelly Bean feels fast, fluid, and smooth. Moving between home screens and switching between apps is effortless, like turning the pages of a book.
Jelly Bean improves performance throughout the system, including faster orientation changes, quicker switching between recent apps, and smoother and more consistent rendering across the system through vsync and triple buffering.
Jelly Bean has more reactive and uniform touch responses, and makes your Android device even more responsive by boosting your device’s CPU instantly when you touch the screen, and turns it down when you don’t need it to improve battery life.

What's new in Android 4.2, Jelly Bean

Accessibility

New Triple tap to enter full screen magnification when you enable 'Magnification gestures'.
New Enable ‘TalkBack’, a screenreader for Android, right from the power menu.
With Jelly Bean, blind or low vision users can use 'Gesture Mode' to reliably navigate the UI using touch and swipe gestures in combination with speech output.
With the new accessibility focus feature, you can move a cursor between controls to maintain a target for the next action or a source for the next navigation event. You can double tap anywhere to launch the current item with accessibility focus.
Text traversal in accessibility now gives you more control – choose to move between pages, paragraphs, lines, words or characters.
TalkBack now supports gestures to trigger actions, to navigate applications, and traverse text.
Android now offers full support for braille accessibility services (download BrailleBack on Google Play).

Android Beam

With Android Beam, introduced in Android 4.1, you can easily share your photos and videos via NFC.
Instantly pair your Android phone or tablet to Bluetooth® devices like headsets or speakers that support the Simple Secure Pairing standard by just tapping them together.

Audio Accessories

Support for USB audio docks.

Browser and WebView

Browser has improved performance, CPU and memory efficiency. With better performance for animations and HTML5 canvases and an updated JavaScript Engine (V8), pages load faster and feel smoother.
Browser now has better HTML5 video support, and has a new user experience. Just touch the video to play and pause, and smoothly transition into and out of fullscreen mode.
Browser now supports the updated HTML5 Media Capture specification on input elements.
WebView now supports vertical text, including Ruby Text and other vertical text glyphs.

Camera and Gallery

New Android 4.2 features a completely redesigned camera app with new tools for taking photos.
New High Dynamic Range or HDR mode (on supported devices) lets you see more detail in your shots by widening the exposure range.
New A brand new photo editor features new filters, borders, and other tools to easily customize your photos.
New With Photo Sphere you can take immersive 360º images and wide angle shots that you can view and share on your phone, tablet or desktop computer.
New Access camera straight from your phone’s lock screen.
To quickly review photos you’ve taken without leaving the camera app, you can swipe from the camera viewfinder. To start snapping photos again, just swipe back to the camera viewfinder.
When viewing photos in Gallery, pinch to zoom out to enter 'filmstrip mode' for rapidly reviewing many pictures. In filmstrip mode you can swipe up or down to delete a photo. You can undo a deletion with a tap.
When you tap to focus on an object there’s a new animation to show the focus state.

Clock

New The clock has been totally redesigned with an all new look which includes both a digital and analog clock style.
New You can use the new stopwatch to track time, count laps and splits, and share your times.
New You can use the new timer to keep track of predetermined periods of time, run multiple timers at once, and even label your timers.
New The world clock lets you check the time in different cities right from the Clock app or your lock screen.
New New clock widgets let you choose from an analog or digital clock widget. You can also resize the digital clock widget to display the time in other cities around the world.

Data Usage

You can now dismiss a data usage warning without changing the data warning threshold.
To disable background data usage when your device is using a particular mobile hotspot, you can designate that SSID as being mobile.
Android now automatically detects when one Jelly Bean device is tethered to another’s Wi-Fi hotspot, and intelligently enables or disables background data usage on that SSID.

Face Unlock

Face Unlock is now even faster and more accurate, with smoother startup and animation.
You can improve face matching accuracy by calibrating in different conditions and with different accessories (e.g. hat, glasses).
Face Unlock can now optionally require a blink to verify that a live person is unlocking the device rather than a photo.

Graphics

New Platform level support for new wireless display settings implemented on Nexus 4, including the ability to discover and connect to Miracast™ compatible devices via Wi-Fi Direct.
New Full HDMI mirroring with notifications and multi-display support.

Internationalization

New Android 4.2 brings improved font positioning, glyph cache performance, and more accurate placement of accents in Indic, Hebrew, Arabic, Thai and Latin font kerning.
New New fonts have been added including Roboto Thin and Nanum Gothic for improved Korean font quality.
Jelly Bean adds support for bidirectional text and more input languages to make the platform accessible to more people around the world.
There is improved support for Arabic and Hebrew, including a new Arabic font, in the platform.
You can now enter text in 18 new input languages including Persian, Hindi and Thai. Additional Indic languages Kannada, Telugu, and Malayalam are now supported by the platform.
Emoji from Unicode 6.0 are now supported.
If the system language is set to Japanese, Japanese specific versions of glyphs are now properly rendered.

Keyboard

New Android 4.2 introduces an all new Gesture Keyboard that lets you glide over letters to type a word while it dynamically predicts what you want to type.
New French, English and Russian dictionaries are even more accurate and relevant, while new dictionaries have been added in Danish, Greek, Finnish, Lithuanian, Latvian, Polish, Slovenian, Serbian, Swedish and Turkish.
The language model in Jelly Bean adapts over time and the keyboard features bigram prediction and correction.
You can now switch languages quickly with the dedicated language selector key on keyboard.
You can use custom keyboard input styles for more than 20 languages, with keymaps for QWERTY, QWERTZ, AZERTY, Dvorak, Colemak, and PC styles.
You can choose the input styles that you want to use for each keyboard, and use a hotkey to switch between them while typing.

Lock Screen

New Android 4.2 lets you place widgets on your device's lock screen to give you faster access to your calendar, Gmail, SMS messages, and even third party app widgets.
New Quickly launch Google Now by swiping up from the bottom edge of your secure lock screen.
New Easily access camera straight from your phone’s lock screen.

Messaging and Talk

New Support for group messaging via MMS.
New notifications display the full text of incoming SMS messages and when you receive an MMS you can view the full photo in the notification.
When entering recipients for an SMS or MMS a new UI collects recipients as chips, making it easier to compose messages.
Talk features a new notification style.

Notifications

You can now take action on notifications directly from the notifications shade.
Notifications from the same application are grouped together, and the first item is automatically expanded. You can also pinch notifications to expand or collapse them.
You now get an image preview in notifications after taking a screenshot. You can quickly share the screenshot directly from the notification.
On 7” tablets you can lock automatic display rotation from the notifications shade.
For Wi-Fi only devices, quickly see the SSID of the access point you're connected to from the notifications shade.
You can now touch-hold a notification to identify the application that created it and turn off notifications from that application if needed, or uninstall the application.

Networking

New Wi-Fi Direct support has been improved, so your device can now remember other devices.
New Faster captive portal detection on Wi-Fi, cellular connections, and pay-as-you-go SIMs.
Wi-Fi protected setup is now supported with WPS push button & PIN support.
A new setting lets you stay on mobile data and avoid nearby Wi-Fi networks with poor connections.

News and Weather

News and Weather has been enhanced to provide more frequent news updates whilst reducing power consumption.

People

The People app is more buttery with smoother animations and improved search performance.
The People app now retrieves high res photos automatically for Google contacts with public Google+ profiles and displays higher res photos (720x720) on certain devices.
High res photos set on Google accounts will be backed up and synced across devices.
The People app has a new 7” tablet layout.
You can now quickly add your favorite contacts to a home screen, directly from the contact's details page.
The People app helps you organize your contacts and reduces duplicates with an Improved auto-joining algorithm.
You can now clear the frequently contacted list from the People app’s favorites tab.

Phone

New Use the phone app in landscape orientation or while in a car dock.
New With new filtering options you can quickly manage and review your call log.
New Improved TalkBack support with a single tap dialpad.
When you miss a call, a new notification lets you return the call or reply by SMS.
Incoming visual voicemails are displayed in a new notification that lets you play the message with a single touch.
During a call a new notification lets you hang up with one touch.
As part of Project Butter, the dial pad is more responsive. Call log scrolling is smoother, and swiping between tabs in Phone is quick and fluid.
You can clear your frequently contacted list in the favorite tab of Phone.
You can now add phone numbers from the call log to existing, read-only contacts.

Settings

New Access Settings by tapping the Quick Settings icon in the notification shade, or swipe down from the top right on tablets or with two fingers on phones to access settings.
New Now quickly toggle Wi-Fi and Bluetooth with a long press in Quick Settings.
Accounts are now displayed in the primary Settings view so you can easily see all the accounts you're signed into on your device.
You can now easily access all Google Privacy Settings in one place by selecting your Google account from Settings.

System

New New 10-inch tablet UI which lets you quickly access your favorite apps from any homescreen and gives improved access to your notifications.
New New multi-user support for tablets lets different users have their own separate, customizable spaces on a single device.
New Tablets can now support up to eight users. Three users can be active at a time, and they can all sync data like email at the same time and even reuse apps if another user has them installed.
New A new display mode ‘Daydream’ allows apps to display interactive screensavers - like a photo album or a Currents stream when your tablet or phone isn’t being used.
New App permissions are now clearer and more intuitive.
New Android 4.2 introduces a new app verification service (for devices that have Google Play installed) that provides enhanced security along with always-on VPN.
New You'll now receive a warning before an app tries to send SMS messages that may cost you money.
New Improved security for devices with debugging enabled - you can enable debugging for each new debugging client.
Device encryption is now more reliable, and periodically reminds you to decrypt your device. SMS messages and calls are now declined when waiting for decryption.
You can long press the ‘Power Off’ option in the power menu to boot your device to safe mode.
A new ‘Reset app preferences’ button lets you quickly manage default applications for specific activities, background data restrictions, notification suppression, and more.
A redesigned dialog with larger icons lets you intuitively choose your preferred application for specific activities.
Google Apps Device Policy on your device may now override the ‘keep screen awake’ option from developer settings.

Text-to-speech

Jelly Bean introduces a new conversational text-to-speech voice in US English, available as both a network engine and an embedded engine via the TTS API.

Voice Typing

A new embedded speech recognizer lets you use Voice Typing even when you don't have an Internet connection.

Widgets

Jelly Bean makes it easier to personalize your home screen. As you place widgets on the screen, everything else automatically moves to make room.
When they're too big, widgets resize on their own. If you choose to resize a widget, apps and widgets will now also move out of the way.
You can now quickly remove apps or widgets from any home screen by picking them up and flinging them to the edge of the screen.
Launching apps and returning back home are now faster and smoother.

The new Google experience on Android

Google Search

New Voice Search lets you launch apps, add meetings to your calendar or even find out when your next appointment is.
With Jelly Bean, a redesigned experience uses the power of the Knowledge Graph to show you search results in a richer way. It's easier to quickly get precise answers to search queries and explore and browse search results.
Get to Google Search faster: Google Search can be opened directly from the lock screen by swiping up. For devices with software navigation keys, you can now swipe up from the system bar to quickly access Google Search with Google Now. For devices with a hardware search key, you can tap it to launch Google Search.
If you're using a wired headset, long press the headset's button to activate Voice Search. You can quickly perform a search query by voice and have the result read back to you.
You can say "Google" to activate Voice Search from within Google Search.
For many search queries performed through Voice Search, you can now hear a spoken answer.
Voice Search recognition is now significantly faster so you can search quickly on the fly.
Voice Search can now recognize queries even when you have a poor network connection.

Google Now

Google Now brings you just the right information at just the right time, helping you manage your day, stay connected and be a local anywhere. And the best part? All of this happens automatically. Cards appear throughout the day at the moment you need them. Learn more.

New Hotel card: Get one-touch navigation to your hotel when you arrive in a new city.
New Restaurant reservation card: Be reminded to leave for the restaurant based on live traffic information.
New Event card: Get reminders about events you purchased a ticket for.
New Package card: See when your online orders ship.
New Next appointment card: When you have an appointment, Google Now checks traffic so you can know how long it'll take to get there. You even get a notification for when you should leave.
New Movies card: See showtimes and ratings for what's playing when you're near a theater. Also be notified when a movie you're interested in arrives at theaters.
New Concerts card: See when your favorite artists have concerts at nearby venues.
New Stocks card: Get real-time information about stocks you track.
New Public alerts card: Receive emergency messages such as storm warnings and earthquake alerts.
New Developing story & breaking news card: See breaking news and other developing stories that match your interests.
New Nearby attractions card: See what nearby attractions are popular to visit.
New Nearby photo spots card: Learn of popular photo spots nearby.
New Time at home card: When you're in a different time zone, Google Now shows you the time at home so you never feel too far away.
Flight card: Get real-time flight status and traffic information to the airport.
Weather card: When you start your day, Google Now shows weather for your current location and work.
Traffic card: Get traffic conditions and alternate routes before you leave home or work.
Sports card: You can see live scores and upcoming games and also buy game tickets on the fly.
Transit card: When you’re near a bus stop or a subway station, this card shows you what buses or trains are next.
Places card: When you’re on the go, Google Now will suggest nearby bars, restaurants, and places of interest.
Currency card: When you're traveling, quickly check the local conversion rate.
Translation card: When you're in a foreign country, you can quickly translate words into the local language.

Google Apps

Calendar

New Calendar can now be displayed as a widget on phone and tablet lock screens.
New Calendar now auto completes when entering event titles.
New New Google Feedback integration lets you give Google feedback and improve Calendar.
Calendar is more buttery. Content fades in, animations are sprinkled throughout, and swiping/paging between days is smoother.
Calendar will now display event colors if you've assigned your event a color.
The 'Today' button on the action bar now shows the current day.
When viewing an event’s details you can now email all the guests with a single tap.
Notifications for upcoming events now display more of the event description to let you quickly see relevant details without having to open the app.
Notifications for upcoming events now let you email all the guests without opening the app, and you can choose a quick response such as "Be there in 10 minutes" or type your own.
A new option in Calendar settings lets you create your own default quick responses for emailing guests.
You can now snooze an upcoming event reminder right from the notification.
Calendar has a new 7” tablet layout.
When viewing Calendar in portrait orientation on tablets, you can hide or expand controls to give you complete control over how you view your Calendar space.
Calendar will now remember whether you've chosen to hide or expand controls so you have a consistent experience viewing Calendar whenever you open it.

Gmail

New Gmail now auto-fits messages to your screen and lets you pinch-to-zoom, so emails are easier than ever to read.
New You can now swipe to archive or delete emails when viewing your Gmail inbox.
New When composing a message, you can attach videos right from Gmail.
New When you receive an email with photos attached, Gmail gives you larger photo previews and a gallery view so you can enjoy the photos more quickly and easily.
Gmail has an optimized view for 7" tablets in portrait orientation to give you a better experience reading email.
Gmail and Email feature updated notifications will give you a preview and digest of your inbox. Notifications will also now display the full text of new mail.

Maps

New Upload your Photo Spheres to Google Maps directly from your phone, so others can experience them on their desktop.
With support for offline maps, you can select an area to cache and later access it even when you don’t have a data connection.
Compass Mode for indoor views and street view is more accurate and responsive with gyroscope support.
With Zagat ratings and reviews built in to Maps, you can quickly get the information you need about places you search for.
You can now browse Google Offers within Maps to find local deals.
Get indoor walking directions in Maps.

Google+

New You can share Photo Spheres with your circles or publicly, and anyone you share with can experience them on Google+ on their desktop.
New Photo Spheres are now also saved in Instant Upload.
As you swipe through the stream, large bold photos now fall into place with animations giving you a more interactive browsing experience.
Google+ on tablets features a new magazines layout in the stream.
You can now create and manage Google+ Events right from your device. Posts and photos are saved to the event so you can relive it at any time.
Party Mode lets you instantly upload and share photos during an Event so you capture all the right moments in one place.
New notifications let you +1, comment, or reshare without having to open the Google+ app.
You can now see live video streams of all participants in a Hangout.
A new navigation menu lets you easily navigate through the app and quickly see Google+ notifications.
When viewing a post you can now swipe to expand and view comments.

YouTube

YouTube has a new, more intuitive user interface, including a guide that provides quick access to your channel subscriptions.
YouTube can now preload videos from subscribed channels for seamless playback even on slower networks.
With a new integrated menu, you can easily watch YouTube on the big screen with Nexus Q or YouTube TV.

Currents

With performance enhancements throughout the application and updates to the user interface, you can browse articles quickly and intuitively.
An enhanced layout engine for articles lets you enjoy dramatic, large images on a variety of articles.
Currents now uses hardware acceleration to make moving between articles smoother.
Currents has a new 7” tablet layout.
For editions written in other languages you can now translate text into your preferred language.

Chrome

New Chrome is the standard browser on Nexus 4, Nexus 7 and Nexus 10.
As a part of Project Butter, Chrome is optimized for fluid and responsive interaction with web content.
To get you started a new product tour guides you through Chrome’s features.
Quickly change tabs by dragging your thumb from the edges of the screen.
Chrome has a new look and feel for the 'Other Devices' page.
Chrome has simplified application-level settings which are more consistent with the rest of the platform.

Google Play

A new set of recommendations widgets use a variety of signals — content that people with similar tastes have purchased, stuff that's popular around where you live, content people in your Google+ circles have +1'ed, and more — to recommend new content like apps, games, music, and movies.
A new My Library widget, which displays all of your recent movies, books, music, and magazines and dynamically changes based on what you've been engaging with recently.
Smart App Updates ensure that only the parts of an application that have changed will be downloaded when you next update it, saving time, bandwidth, and battery.
App encryption for paid apps.

Google Play Books

Embedded audio tracks and videos can now be easily streamed directly within the book you're reading.
You can now add bookmarks to remember important information for later or pick up where you left off reading.
Play Books now offers fixed layout books, with optimized for tablet-reading of books like children’s books and comic books which have specifcially designed graphics and layouts.
For visually impaired users automatic text-to-speech settings have been enabled.

Google Play Movies and TV Shows

New You can now buy Movies and TV Shows and access your library from Google TV.
Movies and TV shows can be quickly downloaded for viewing offline, now with just one tap.
When you make a new purchase from Google Play that item will be synced directly to the Play Movies & TV Shows app ready for you to watch when you open the app.
You can zoom in during video playback.

Google Play Music

New You can discover new music in Google Play by touching 'explore similar artists' and swiping between artists to instantly listen to previews of their music.
A new Sound Search widget lets you identify songs you hear and gives the option to purchase them directly from Google Play.
The Google Play Music widget now lets you thumbs up songs as they are playing and features a new design for better readability.
Playlist art is automatically created based on the album art of songs in that playlist.
In the now playing bar you can swipe between screens.
The Recent screen features larger album art.
You can delete tracks within the app.
There is a Now Playing queue of tracks.
There is an integrated media routing menu for listening to tracks on Nexus Q, Bluetooth audio devices and headsets.
You can set a song as your ringtone from Play Music, and the new ringtone editor lets you crop that ringtone to the exact section of the track you’d like to use.