FOXNews.com: Google announces Nexus 7 -- the Jelly Bean-powered tablet

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Google announces Nexus 7 -- the Jelly Bean-powered tablet Jun 27th 2012, 17:45 San Francisco –  Forget Ice Cream Sandwiches. Jelly Beans are the new tech delight. Google announced the next version of its popular Android operating system at the company's I/O conference: Android version 4.1, code named Jelly Bean. "Jelly Bean builds upon what we created with Ice Cream Sandwich," Hugo Barra, director of product management for Android, told the crowd of developers. The new software offers smarter resizing of screen icons, improves text input thanks to a predictive keyboard that guesses the next word you type, and boosts speed. Jelly Bean can also see the future. The operating system anticipates where your fingers will touch the screen and plans accordingly, explained Dave Burke, Android engineering director. This and other modifications designed to improve the operating system were part of a program called "Project Butter," Burke explained. The new version of the software rethinks search as well, based on the massive revamp to the company's search engine unveiled in mid-May.  The company calls it the Knowledge Graph, and it has more than 500 million such things, with 3.5 billion connections between them.  Earlier versions of Android used voice recognition to translate your speech into emails, but the engine doing the translation was online. If you're on a plane, you can't use it. The speech recognition function has been built into the Jelly Bean version of Android, Barra said, so that it will work offline. Google also added 18 new input languages, including Persian and Thai. Google is also expected to unveil a small, Google-branded tablet at the company's developer I/O event. If speculation about the long-rumored device pans out, the Google tablet is likely be seen more of a threat to Amazon.com's Kindle Fire than Apple's top-selling iPad. More details should emerge Wednesday during the opening speech of a three-day conference in San Francisco for computer programmers. Like the Kindle Fire, the Google tablet is believed to have a 7-inch screen, measured diagonally -- smaller than the iPad's nearly 10-inch display. If it's the smaller size, Google's tablet probably would be in the same price range as the Kindle Fire, which sells for $199. A Google expansion into the tablet market would bring another imposing entrant into what is already a battle of tech heavyweights. Last week, Microsoft announced its own tablet, Surface. Expected to go on sale this fall, it will run on a revamped version of Windows and compete directly with the iPad. Google also could provide a glimpse at a pair of Internet-connected glasses that it eventually hopes to market as a way to continuously filter and share life through the Web. The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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