An All New Flavor Of Jelly Bean

In the past five months, my Nexus 7 has become a vital part of my daily routine. Compact, lightweight, and feature-rich, it’s everything I want in a tablet. Or at least, it was when it came out. Let’s be honest, I can never be quite satisfied with my gadgets, and the moment I get one that I love, I hear about some new feature I’d love to add to it. That’s a big part of why I buy Nexus devices, with their rapid access to new versions of Android (my disappointing Verizon Galaxy Nexus notwithstanding). This week, Google rolled out Android 4.2. A minor update to the mobile OS (Google has opted not to change the name from Jelly Bean), 4.2 still brings enough new features to the table to leave me satisfied for at least a few more weeks.

One of my favorite parts of Android has always been widgets. Right there on my home screen, I can get my most frequently accessed information. Calendar, email, to-do list, and the weather are all popular choices. Now, Google has given users the ability to add a few widgets to the lock screen bringing that information even closer to your fingertips. There are only four lock screen widgets available for now. A clock widget that mimics the old lock screen well, a scrollable calendar widget, a scrollable Gmail widget, and a Google Sound Search widget. You can also swipe to the left to get to your camera app without unlocking. I thought Sound Search was an excellent choice for this feature. Few things on a phone need a faster response than “What’s that song on the radio?” The Gmail widget, on the other hand, is a troubling choice. It’s just like the Gmail widget from the home screen, which means you see the user’s email address, and the subject and first line of any email sent to them. That means an unauthorized user can potentially see a frightening amount of information. I’d recommend against using the Gmail widget and using the calendar widget only with careful consideration.

Perhaps the most interesting new feature is multiple user accounts. While smartphones are often intensely personal devices that are rarely shared, tablet users have long clamored for a way to share one device with the whole family. A 10-inch tablet fits in perfectly on the coffee table, but not if everyone who picks it up gets to share your browser history, read your email, and buy apps on your credit card. Google has finally answered this need, letting Android 4.2 tablet users (for now, that means owners of the Nexus 7 and Nexus 10) create multiple accounts on the same device.

Creating new accounts is fairly simple. There is a new item in the settings menu for users, where you’ll find the ability to add and remove user accounts, as well as set a nickname and profile picture. Only the device owner (the first user account created on that device) can create or delete user accounts.

After you have a new account, you’ll see a couple of dots at the bottom of your lock screen. One will be your profile picture, and the other will be a colored dot, which serves as a placeholder in accounts that have no picture yet. Tap on the second dot, and you’ll see an entirely different lock screen. The wallpaper and lock screen widgets will change to reflect the settings of the second user. Security settings are separate as well, so that you can lock your screen with a password, while your spouse uses a PIN, and your toddler just slides to unlock.

The big change, though, is inside the new profile. A few global settings, like WiFi status, are identical across accounts. Everything else is unique. Users can have separate Google accounts, browser histories, apps, and home screen setups. Nothing crosses over between accounts, so you can let your kid play Angry Birds Star Wars without losing your own place in the game.

I do wish Google had come up with some way to create kids accounts though. With the current arrangement, the only way I can install apps on a secondary profile is by adding a Google account to it. If I want install the apps I’ve bought for her during the last few years, I need to add my own Google account, and that puts me right back where I started, giving a five year old access to my Gmail. I’d love to see the device owner be able to install apps onto other users’ profiles. For now, I think multiple user profiles is only really good for sharing tablets between adults or older kids with their own Google accounts. This seems like a pretty big failure on Google’s part, in light of the multi-user options Amazon and Barnes and Noble have in their tablet offerings.

Samsung’s TouchWiz interface has given users an easy way to toggle important settings like WiFi and GPS in the notification shade for a while now, and custom ROMs like CyanogenMod have emulated that approach. Android 3.0 (Honeycomb) brought comparable functionality to the stock OS, but those controls took an extra step to access. Those functions were also only available on tablets, which could be confusing to users who logically assumed Android would work the same way everywhere.

Android 4.2 brings a unified quick settings menu to the stock OS. It swipes down from the top of the screen, like the notification shade. On tablets, notifications now come down when you swipe on the left, while quick settings appear when you choose the right side of the screen. For phones, quick settings appear after a two-finger swipe from the top or when you tap the settings button in the notification shade. Inside, you’ll find toggles for auto-rotation and airplane mode. Battery, WiFi, and Bluetooth settings shortcuts are all there, and the WiFi and Battery icons give you info on their current status (finally, battery percentage in numbers instead of vague icons!). There’s also access to a brightness slider, and the main settings menu. The final button is your profile image, and tapping it brings you to your lock screen, presumably for convenient user switching.

The quick settings menu leaves room for improvement. I’d rather have WiFi and Bluetooth toggles than access to their settings, and there’s an empty space that I’d have loved to see filled with a GPS toggle. Overall, though, this new menu is a huge improvement.

In addition to these highlights, Google’s also added several other features to Android with this release. Swype-like gesture typing; an interactive screensaver called Daydream; Photo Sphere panoramic images that let you capture the entire scene around, above, and below the user; and Miracast support to compete with Apple’s AirPlay. Taken all together, it’s a nice little bump in functionality for the two Nexus devices of the last year and makes for an impressive pair of new Nexuses, too. Now, if only I could figure out what makes it worthy of Google bumping the version number to 4.2, without moving away from the Jelly Bean name.