Jelly Bean Impressions

Google's newest version of Android, 4.1 "Jelly Bean", rolled out to my Galaxy Nexus earlier this week. Never one to let a major Android update go un-blogged, here are my opinions so far.

The best thing here is how much faster everything feels than in ICS. The so-called 'Project Butter' is much more than just a performance tweak, there's a lot of new transitions such as slide-ins when opening apps and jumping from the camera to photos. The overall experience on the Nexus is smoother than any other phone I've tried, including more powerful devices like the One X or S3.


The UI looks similar to ICS, the only thing that really jumps out is the richer notifications, which adds handy shortcuts to save a few seconds here and there. Other changes are less obvious but just as welcome, like the way homescreen icons and widgets intelligently re-arrange themselves when you drag them about.


The big new feature is Google Now, which works with a much-improved voice search to offer a personal assistant of sorts. It's fun to play about with but personally I still don't find it quite accurate or robust enough to use on a regular basis (though still a step up from the likes of Siri and S-Voice). For example, it can provide directions to a local tube station, but didn't manage to understand a post code, which is what I usually enter into Maps. I don't doubt that AI is the way forward, but still has some way to go until it makes a reliable alternative to manually inputting commands.


Jelly Bean is probably the best .x update yet, with a performance upgrade that I wouldn't expect in a minor version jump. It'd be nice to see some improvements on the stock apps like messaging and the dialler, with most manufacturer skins and 3rd party apps improving on these areas. The core OS itself though has reached a level that feels close to perfection, I can't imagine where Google will take it next, but look forwards to seeing what they come up with.

Android on the Web

One of my most wanted Android features has been a way to control basic functionality of the device via a web browser, such as messaging, file access and photo viewing. I came across an app the other day called AirDroid that looked like a good solution.

AirDroid offers a huge choice of features, including those mentioned and some other useful additions incuding phone details (battery status, disk usage etc), contact info, URL sending, clipboard access and screenshots (with root). All features are accessed in a well designed web view, with it's own window management that makes most actions much quicker than doing them on the phone.

There's a few downsides though. One is that you need to be over the same wifi connection, so truly remote access or use whilst on 3G is not an option. You also need to enter a code generated on the phone every time you access the web view, which gets annoying and means you need your phone in-hand every time you want to access it.

Another app that doesn't suffer from either of these issues is MightyText, which is is a fantastically handy way of reading and sending text messaged from a web browser wherever you are. As the name suggests though, texting is all it does.

It'd be great to see Google make their own solution to this, combining the functionality of AirDroid with the accessibility of MightyText. For now though, both are excellent apps and worth trying out. Any other suggestions for apps that can do this?