The official Android 4.2 Jelly Bean update began to hit Google's Nexus 7 and Galaxy Nexus devices yesterday, bringing with it multiuser support for tablets, a revamped pull-down notifications panel, a new 10-inch tablet user interface, lock screen widgets, and several other notable features. The lock screen widgets and multiuser features weren't ready in time for our big Android 4.2 review, but with the software update officially live, we went back to get some hands-on time with the new features we didn't have a chance to use before.
Multiuser support
Users can be created and deleted from the Users area in your tablet's settings. The first person to use the tablet is designated as the tablet owner and can add and delete other accounts at will; network settings and app permissions are universal and shared among all users on the tablet, but all other settings—including wallpapers, home screen and lock screen layouts, PINs, screen brightness, and individual app settings, among others—are unique to each user.
The new user setup process is more or less identical to the first-time setup routine that you go through when you unbox the tablet: you associate your Google account with the tablet, determine what location settings are enabled, enter your name, and you're ready to go. A brand-new user account with no e-mails, apps, or other configured settings takes up just 12.78MB on our Nexus 7 tablet, though this will quickly increase as other users start to download stuff. Other users' background services also take up a small amount of RAM—though your mileage may vary, we observed usage between 20 and 60 megabytes on our Nexus 7—a fraction of the 1GB or 2GB of RAM in most shipping Android tablets today.
Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments
via Ars Technica http://arstechnica.com
