HTC One X gets early Jelly Bean build, unofficially

With the new generation of phones with quad-core processors out, users are looking for newer, cooler features and the most important one to figure in this list is Google’s new Android OS - Jelly Bean. Most of these phones already come with Android 4.0 ICS but modders and hackers have been able to mod Jelly Bean onto devices. HTC’s popular One X is one of the first to get this treat from the folks at the XDA Developers forums. Head over to the the forums to get a download link for the ROM.

The modded Jelly Bean ROM is remotely based on the CyanogenMod ROM. The modder hasn’t been able to get the ROM to work flawlessly and there are still some issues that need to be ironed out. For example, the Wi-Fi, radio, audio and even the camera aren’t working. This makes the ROM something you would install only if you’re extremely curious about the feel and look of the new operating system. We would recommend waiting a few days or weeks longer before a more stable and usable version of the build is made available.

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The phone running the Android 4.1 OS

While not all the features may be available with this port, here’s a quick look at what Jelly Bean brings to the table:

• Project Butter: Just as the name suggests, this feature aims to make the operating system on devices extremely smooth. The developers have increased the framerate on Jelly Bean to 60 FPS along with vsync and triple buffering implementation to provide a smoother, buttery user experience. With Jelly Bean developers also get a chance to use a new tool called systrace that showcases what the rendering engine is currently doing. At the Google I/O conference, Google showed off the difference in speed between Ice Cream Sandwich and Jelly Bean; the former clearly pales in comparison.

• Text Input: As mentioned earlier, with Jelly Bean the keyboard is a lot faster and more accurate. The biggest addition here is voice input. Jelly Bean does not require users to have a network connection to make it work as the entire speech synthesis is done on the device itself. The predictive keyboard has been touched up with a couple of new features as well, and 18 new input languages are going to be added soon. 

• Camera: Google have not left out the camera with the update. Jelly Bean brings a new user interface to the camera app, besides gesture input, so you can swipe sideways to access the gallery like on WP smartphones. You can also delete images by swiping them off the screen.

• Notifications: With Android 4.1 Jelly Bean, the notifications bar has also received an upgrade and it allows for more complex actions and alerts, straight from the notification bar. For example, missed call alerts give you the option to ring the caller from the notifications bar itself. 

• Android Beam: With Android Beam, one can now share videos via NFC, along with the ability to pair a Bluetooth device with NFC capabilities by merely tapping on it.

So, if you want to tinker around with Jelly Bean hit up the download link above and let us know how the test run goes!