Android 4.3, Jelly Bean
Android 4.3, an even sweeter Jelly Bean, is available now on Nexus phones and tablets.
Restricted profiles limit access to apps and content, at home with your family and at work. Bluetooth Smart support makes Android ready for a whole new class of mobile apps that connect to fitness sensors. Games look great thanks to the 3D realistic, high performance graphics powered by OpenGL ES 3.0.
And there's a lot more new in this release:
Audio
- Virtual surround sound - enjoy movies from Google Play with surround sound on Nexus 7 (2013 edition) and other Nexus devices.Surround sound is powered by Fraunhofer Cingo™ mobile audio technology.
Dial pad
- Autocomplete - just start touching numbers or letters and the dial pad will suggest phone numbers or names. To turn on this feature, open your phone app settings and enable “Dial pad autocomplete.”
Graphics
- OpenGL ES 3.0 - Android now supports the latest version of the industry standard for high performance graphics.
- Wireless Display for Nexus 7 (2013 edition) and Nexus 10 - project from your tablet to a TV.
Internationalization and localization
- Additional language support - Android is now translated in Africaans, Amharic (አማርኛ), Hindi (हिंदी), Swahili (Kiswahili), and Zulu (IsiZulu).
- Hebrew, Arabic, and other RTL (right-to-left) - now supported in the home screen, settings, and Phone, People, and Keep apps.
Keyboard & input
- Easier text input - an improved algorithm for tap-typing recognition makes text input easier.
- Lower latency input for gamepad buttons and joysticks.
Location
- Location detection through Wi-Fi - use Wi-Fi to detect location without turning on Wi-Fi all the time.
Networking
- Bluetooth Smart support (a.k.a. Bluetooth Low-Energy) - devices like Nexus 4 and Nexus 7 (2013 edition) are now Bluetooth Smart Ready.
- Bluetooth AVRCP 1.3 support - display song names on a car stereo.
Settings
- Disabled apps tab - check which apps are disabled in Settings > Apps.
System
- Restricted profiles - put your tablet into a mode with limited access to apps and content.
- Setup wizard simplification - getting started on Android is easier thanks to the ability to correct previous input, and because of streamlined user agreements.
- Faster user switching - switching users from the lock screen is now faster.
- Enhanced photo daydream - navigate through interesting albums.
Create restricted profiles that limit access to apps
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.
Accessibility
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
Camera and Gallery
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
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
People
Phone
Settings
System
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.