Google has announced yesterday at the Google I/O their first own-branded tablet, Nexus 7 along with the new version of their Android mobile OS, Android 4.1 Jelly Bean that will be seen for the first time running on Google’s Nexus 7 tablet.

Let us introduce you with Google’s Nexus 7 tablet before we give you an overview of the new version of Android. As we know Nexus 7 tablet is the first Google-branded tablet manufactured by ASUS, it is also the first tablet to feature Android 4.1 Jelly Bean mobile OS. It is powered by a 1.2GHz quad-core Tegra 3 processor along with 12-core GPU that will make the performance and gaming incredibly fast.

Nexus 7 sports a 7-inch IPS LCD display with a resolution of 1280 x 800 pixels and 400 nits of brightness. The tablet supports WiFi, Bluetooth, WWAN, NFC and features a 1.2-megapixel front-facing camera. The tablet comes with 1GB RAM and will be available in 8GB and 16GB variants carrying a price tag of $199 and $249 respectively. The tablet is now up for pre-order in US, UK, Canada and Australia via Google Play, with shipping starting from mid-July. For more information visit the official Nexus website. Watch the Nexus 7 hands-on video below.

Coming to Android 4.1 Jelly Bean, it is just a slight bump to the Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich with only a few noteworthy features introduced. Jelly Bean is developed keeping the Ice Cream Sandwich as its base. Earlier the Jelly Bean version was believed to be referred as Android 5.0 as it was expected to be a major update to Android 4.0.

Jelly Bean is said to run smoother and faster than Ice Cream Sandwich. The new version has improved dynamic notifications where you can send email or make calls directly from the notifications. Text Input has been improved, predictive keyboard can guess the next word more accurately. The Voice Typing will now work without any data connection as the speech interpreter will now reside within your device.

Voice search has been improved, it can speak back to you to deliver precise results using the Knowledge Graph. Jelly Bean introduces a new feature named Google Now, which automatically gets all the right information at the right time by looking at your search history, Calendar and more. It can tell you the day’s weather in the morning, updates scores of all your favorite teams, alert you for your favorite restaurant using your current location.

Google has also announced that they will roll-out the Jelly Bean update for Galaxy Nexus, Motorola Xoom and Nexus S starting from mid-July.

SOURCE: Official Google Blog, Engadget