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