Sony starts rolling out Jelly Bean for the Xperia V

Sony's Xperia blog has confirmed that the company has started rolling out Android 4.1.2 Jelly Bean for yet another handset, the Xperia V (LT25i). From what is known at the moment, the update seems to be available across some European countries, including Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Germany and Switzerland. Yesterday, Sony started rolling out Jelly Bean to the Xperia T, at least in the Netherlands.

Jelly Bean updates galore.

This development is in line with reports from last year, when Sony Mobile confirmed that the Jelly Bean upgrade plans for the Xperia T, TX and V were moving forward, and these smartphones would be upgraded to Jelly Bean during February and March. The Xperia P, J and go are set to be the next in line to receive the upgrade—from the end of March. Upgrades to the Xperia S, SL, ion and Acro S will follow in the weeks to come.

Android 4.1 Jelly Bean 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 alerts 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 the phone is not connected to the Internet. Google states that it has re-designed search from the ground up in Jelly Bean with a new user interface and faster, more natural Voice Search.

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 HTML 5 canvases and an updated JavaScript Engine (V8), pages load faster and feel smoother.
• Browser now has better HTML 5 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.
• Content in the Calendar 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.