Google Android 4.1 Jelly Bean review

Google Current is a news reader that collects the user's favourite news web sites and articles into a custom magazine interface. A key selling point is the app's ability to collect and display the user's Google Reader subscriptions into a custom magazine.

Testing the service we were amazed at how well it coped with our fairly full RSS feed, which at present follows over 200 different sources. Using it we found that Google Current did a decent job of presenting us with the stories we'd actually be interested in, picking out bespoke topics we regularly looked at and avoiding those we generally passed over.

The People app is fairly similar to the equivalent People feature seen on Windows Phone 7, except with an increased focus on Google+. The feature retrieves 720x720 photos of user's Google contacts and syncs them with their public Google+ profiles.

While we're not too bothered about the Google+ features we did like the apps' organisation services. The People app automatically merges duplicate contacts and syncs the updated contact list across all your Android devices, saving you hours of time you'd have otherwise spent cleaning out your address books.

Notifications
Google has overhauled its notification system for Android 4.1 Jelly Bean. The most noticeable change to notifications on Jelly Bean is the alerts size. Android 4.1 Jelly Bean notifications are significantly bigger than those seen on Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich. Other key additions include the ability to view preview versions of incoming emails and pinch notifications to expand or collapse them.

Security
Android 4.1 Jelly Bean features a few new security features, chief of which is its new safe mode. The safe mode can be accessed by pressing the power off option, which can be accessed via the power button. The mode disables all third party apps, halting their permissions and cutting access to them.

Android 4.1 Jelly Bean also features a new 'Reset app preferences' button. The feature grants the user a variety of app management options, letting users do things like implement background data restrictions and notifications suppressions.

Both features are useful, especially given the recent boom in malware on Android mobile devices, which has seen criminals target the OS using malicious apps distributed on third party marketplaces.

This article was originally published on V3.