Android 4.2 review

Notifications are now easier to react to thanks to context-sensitive buttons like these

On smartphones bar you can access the new settings menu from the notifications bar by pressing the button in the upper-right corner. Here are numerous regularly used settings in an easy to jab tiled layout. It tells you things such as what Wi-Fi network you’re on and how much battery you have, and pressing them takes you through to the full settings menu.

You can check settings and change them from the new menu

On tablets, the settings and notifications menus are completely separate. To get notifications you swipe down from the top on the left-hand side of the screen, while swiping on the right gives you the settings menu. It’s a good way of making use of the extra screen space on tablets for a useful shortcut.

Speaking of tablets, the update for the Google Nexus 7 means its home page now functions in landscape too, rather than just in portrait as before. This is a huge improvement when flicking from movies or games to the home screen and back.

LOCK SCREEN WIDGETS

The lock screen has also undergone an upgrade, with the addition of widgets. These allow for at a glance information without having to unlock your device and browse to the appropriate app.

Calendar widget on the lock screen

By default the time and date are shown, but by swiping left you can add further widgets, such as a calendar or email Tap on an item and you then need to unlock the device to view the full entry. Swipe right and you can go straight to the camera, if your device has one.

WIRELESS DISPLAY

The latest version of Android can mirror what’s being displayed onscreen via a Wi-Fi connection to a compatible receiver. It uses the Miracast standard, which is now supported under Intel’s WiDi 3.5. It uses Wi-Fi Direct to achieve this, so no router is required. It’s pretty handy if you want to watch YouTube videos on your TV, but most people will settle for a cable instead.

CAMERA APP

We cover the new camera app and the new Photosphere picture feature at length in our Google Nexus 4 review. In short here, we didn’t like the new camera interface, it felt excessively minimal and we’d rather have some more obvious menus. Most smartphone users won’t have to deal with this though, as the vast majority of manufacturers prefer to use their own camera apps.

Photosphere is a neat new feature, but we’ve seen better examples

Meanwhile, the Photosphere function lets you take multiple pictures and stitches them together automatically, it’s good fun but the results can’t live up to those created by Microsoft’s Photosynth. That’s not available for Android unfortunately, despite appearing on iOS.

BENCHMARKS

We ran some benchmarks on the Nexus 7 and Nexus 4 and couldn’t see any significant differences in terms of results, and certainly no consistency across different hardware that might show the update is significantly faster or slower than its predecessor.

MORE JELLY BEANS

The new version of Android has some useful additions, with multiple users being by far the biggest addition. The updated notifications are also handy, though we doubt we’ll use the lockscreen widgets or WiDi support. Tablet users should cry out for an update for their hardware – or just buy the Nexus 7 or Nexus 10 – but for phone users it’s less of a big deal, with no must-have changes from Android 4.1.