Samsung Galaxy S Advance to get Jelly Bean in January

Samsung has been quite prompt with updates for its smartphones so far, but it seems some of its customers are in for a bit of a wait. The Samsung Galaxy S Advance GT-I9070A was expected to receive Android 4.1 Jelly Bean in November, but Samsung Germany has put up a post on Facebook stating that this handset will now receive the update in January 2013.

When Samsung's commitment to pushing out the update in November didn't hold, it stated that the handset would be updated by the end of December. Hopefully, the date will not be pushed back beyond January, and Samsung does update the Galaxy S Advance to Jelly Bean in the first month of next year.

For those interested in updating their devices to Jelly Bean, this bit of information will be useful. 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 alerts from the drop-down menu itself without needing to open the app. Another interesting feature is that voice typing is now faster, and works even when one is not connected to the Internet. 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. The voice search feature 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 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.