jellybean

In yet another sign that Android 4.1 should soon hit the Galaxy S III, a video has surfaced which shows exactly that. You can see in the clip below that things look pretty legit and that TouchWiz UI remains largely unaffected. All the stuff we've come to appreciate in Jelly Bean is present, including Google Now, expanded notifications, and that buttery smooth interface.

With the android world a'buzz with Jelly Bean news after its announcement on Wednesday, people are wanting to know what's new with it. We gave you a full run-down a couple days ago, but now we're finding out some specifics, and there's something else that wasn't mentioned in the keynote: a new permission.

After upgrading my Galaxy Nexus (GSM) to Jelly Bean last night (I know, I know, I'm a few days late), I unlocked its bootloader (the usual fastboot oem unlock) and commenced rooting, which I thought would only take a minute or two. However, after almost 2 hours of pushing, flashing, rebooting, and trying no less than 5 different root methods, I still didn't have root. Something must have changed under the hood, and no root method I was trying was working (even PaulOBrien's SuperBoot).

The new version of Android is out, it's real, and yours truly has a (mostly) working copy.

The title may not rhyme anymore, but it's still home to the most in-depth look at the next version of Android on the internet. That's right, the world's most OCD changelog is here to point out every polished pixel of Android 4.1: Jelly Bean.

The usual GTKA caveats apply: This is beta code (the Jelly Bean preview from I/O, in fact) and subject to change. Plus I've got it running on a phone it isn't even meant to run on, so we won't be too hard on it. The good news is we aren't messing around with emulators this time. These are real screenshots from a real phone.

One of the new features that ships with Jelly Bean is Google's Sound Search widget that helps identify songs after listening to short samples. If you've ever used SoundHound or Shazam, you know exactly what this does. The difference is this widget is pre-installed on Jelly Bean, comes directly from Google, and hooks right into Google Play.

Among the myriad of announcements made during yesterdays keynote, there was the announcement of magazines and the ability to rent and purchase TV shows as well as movies in the Play Store. These were obviously much needed improvements if Google wants to actually make some money of off its zero percent profit Nexus 7.

Airpush and similar notification spammers, your days are numbered. The people have spoken - everyone universally hates these types of ads, and Google actually listened to our numerous complaints.

In Jelly Bean, you can not only figure out exactly which app caused a notification by long-pressing it and selecting App Info - you can actually disable notifications on a per-app basis altogether. That, my friends, is not just a slap in Airpush's face - it's a swift kick in its private parts.

This is exactly how it's done, in case you wanted a demonstration:

Google pulled out all the stops on the first day of it’s I/O developers conference, with lots of cool announcements to please us technology enthusiasts. If like me you couldn’t be there, here’s a summary of what we missed…

Another major enhancement we've just learned about with the announcement of Jelly Bean is called Project Butter. Butter (so named likely due to the colloquialism "smooth as butter") represents a new, more efficient processing framework for Android's latest and greatest iteration, making the OS much faster (allowing animation up to 60fps). Android 4.1 also makes apps more responsive, reducing touch latency and "anticipating where your finger will be at the time of screen refresh."

"How is such an enhancement possible?" I can almost hear you wondering. Take it from the Android developer site:

This just in from Google I/O: A system dump of Jelly Bean from a GSM Galaxy Nexus. You can run over to RootzWiki right now and grab yourself a copy.

Somewhere, deep in this zip file, are all the goodies we saw today at I/O. Expect bits from this to be chopped, ported, and crammed into existing devices shortly.