Android 4.2 features for the new Nexus smartphone
As the holiday season approaches, rumours of a new Nexus device (or devices) are reaching fever pitch! But, a new Nexus normally means another new version of Android. So just four months after the release of Android 4.1 Jelly Bean, we start asking ourselves what can we expect from Android 4.2 features?
Android 4.2 rumours
Thus far the rumours have been coming thick and fast; we’ve heard rumours of Google Now updates, a customisation centre and updates to Google Play and the stock video player!
Google Now is Android’s alternative to Siri, but has a slightly different aim. It is more of an organisation tool and it will answer your questions, organise and remind you of your schedule, send voice spoken text messages and more! The initial implementation of the software on Jelly Bean devices has been good, but it’s widely expected that Google will refine and enhance the service within the expected roll out of Android 4.2 features.
The suggestions of a customisation centre are very intriguing too. Android is famously difficult to customise for first time users. It’s quite hard to get the hang of sorting through settings menus to find ringtone, wallpaper and lock-screen settings. This rumoured customisation centre would alleviate all of those concerns; it could bring all of your options into one place, making it quicker and a easier to change your home-screen picture to the latest picture of your adorable cat!
And finally, there are rumours of updates to the Google Play store and the Android video player. These are the most likely of these updates! Google has been striving to offer more personalised results and there is no reason why they shouldn’t extend this to the Play Store too. The same goes for promotions on the store, it’d be a great help if Google finds apps we’ll want to use or points us straight to the apps which are on sale! The video player, on the other hand, would benefit from increased codec compatibility, so you don’t get the annoying ‘Sorry, this video cannot be played’ warning!
Android 4.2 features we’d love to see
The rumours for the next version of Android really do sound great, if only incremental, but if they implement any of them, they’d be very welcome additions to Google’s little green robot. But, there are just a couple of other things which would be nice to see.
The first of which will only affect people who have an Android tablet, because most people would love to be able to pair their phone and be able to read and send texts on their tablet! There are already apps available which can do this, but HP managed to offer this feature with their Touchpad device last year. It would seem to make sense too because you just look a bit silly having to keep swapping between devices every time you receive a text message!
The second is support for multiple users. This again is primarily focused on tablets because they tend to be more of a family device than a phone would be. Multiple accounts would be good for a couple of reasons; firstly, it would give you some privacy, just in case you have an email you don’t want others reading, for example. Secondly, you might not want other people playing on your favourite game, you’d be annoyed if someone completed half of a world on Angry Birds that you’d set aside for tomorrow evening’s entertainment! Sony for example has already implemented a ‘guest mode’ on their new Xperia Tablet S, but it would be great for Google to offer a built in alternative to all devices!
Hopefully we’ll find out how accurate we were on October 29th when Google’s Andy Rubin will be at All Things D’s: Dive Into Mobile! It’d be great if Google manages to surprise us with a few extra goodies that we didn’t even know we wanted!
Our latest post on Android 4.2 features was kindly contributed by James Eley from The Tech Front.