As we mentioned yesterday, the rollout to Android 4.1 Jelly Bean has begun for Motorola RAZR HD owners.
For those of you who may not know what the update brings, here’s a bit of a heads up straight from Motorola. Key features that you won’t have seen on ICS include Google Now and Google Voice Search, both of which are pretty cool.
Google Now
Google Now is all about providing you with information you want when you want it, before you even have to ask for it. Around Sydney, it does useful things like advising you of the day’s weather ahead, how long it’ll take you to get to work in current traffic (or, via public transport), and details of how to get to places you want to visit – e.g. if you do a Google search for a JB Hi Fi store on the desktop, then before you even go to look, you’ll have a Google Now card giving you driving directions and estimated time of arrival waiting for you on your Android.
For a bit more of a demo, check out this video:
Google Voice Search
For anyone that’s used Google’s speech recognition before, you’ll know its scarily accurate, and at least in my experience, more accurate than iOS’ Siri or voice typing, which frequently made mistakes understanding me speak. Google has no such difficulty, and it can do pretty great things with a single key press. Press and hold on Home, and Voice Search will activate. Ask it something like “give me driving directions to work”, and it’ll do precisely that.
Cool stuff. Check out the demo below:
If you’re the impatient kind, you can force your handset to check for updates and download it as soon as it’s available. Go to Settings > About Phone > System Updates, and make sure you’ve either got a good battery charge, or a charger available, as it may take a little while to download and install.
For RAZR M owners, the update is coming a little bit later, and is likely to be early in 2013, however more specific information hasn’t been given at this stage. A shame, but my RAZR M is running Jelly Bean already, thanks to a leaked Verizon Jelly Bean image and a bit of tweaking to make it work in Australia.
Have you got the upgrade to Jelly Bean on your RAZR HD yet? What do you think?
