Jelly Bean update for Samsung Galaxy S II, Note delayed to 2013

Samsung's 2011 flagship device—the Galaxy S II—still has its fans. Users of the S II and the Note have been eagerly awaiting the imminent update to Jelly Bean. According to SamMobile, they might have to wait longer. Samsung has delayed the update to the December-January window, after a series of previous delays.

One of the reasons for the delay could be the recent reveal of the exploit on Exynos 4 based devices. Samsung may be working on a fix for the exploit in the upcoming update. The company could also be better optimising its new Touch Wizz for the older devices. The delay could also be caused by the localisation required for different countries, as Samsung plans to release the update globablly instead of rolling it out in specific countries at a time. Users will have to wait till January 2013 to see.

Users of the S II and the Note will have to wait a while longer

Back in November, the test firmware for the Android 4.1 Jelly Bean update for the S II was leaked by a developer on the XDA Developers forum. At the time, the build was said to be almost perfect, and that Samsung would start rolling out the update quite soon.

Android 4.1 builds on top of Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich). This operating system is designed to make everything smoother, faster and more fluid. Notifications are now more dynamic, allowing you to access and interact with the alert from the drop down menu itself without ever having to open the app. Another interesting feature is that voice typing is now faster, working even when one does not have a data connection. Google had also stated that it has re-designed search from the ground up in Jelly Bean with a new user interface and faster, more natural Voice Search. It went on to state that one can type their query or simply ask Google a question. Google can speak back, delivering a precise answer, powered by the Knowledge Graph, if it knows one, in addition to a list of search results.

Here are some of the key features that Android 4.1 Jelly Bean brings to the table:

• With Jelly Bean, blind users can use 'Gesture Mode' to reliably navigate the UI using touch and swipe gestures in combination with speech output.
• TalkBack, a screen reader for Android, now supports gestures to trigger actions, navigate applications and traverse text.
• 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.
• Calendar is more buttery. Content fades in, animations are sprinkled throughout and swiping/paging between days is smoother.
• You can now swipe from the camera viewfinder to quickly review photos you've taken without having to leave the camera app. You can swipe back to the camera viewfinder to start snapping photos again.
• When taking a photo, a new animation sweeps your photo off the screen. There is now a new paging animation when swiping between photos.
• You can now enter text in one of 18 new input languages, including Persian, Hindi and Thai. Additional Indic languages Kannada, Telugu and Malayalam are now supported by the platform.
• You can use custom keyboard input styles for more than 20 languages, with keymaps for Qwerty, Qwertz, Azerty, Dvorak, Colemak and PC styles.
• 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.