Far too often it’s easy for us to forget that smartphones from recent memory are still current and plenty good enough for regular use today. Take the Galaxy Note for instance, it might have launched at the end of 2011 – at least internationally – but does that mean it’s a bad phone? Certainly not, it’s got a good looking Super AMOLED display and was the first device to give us the S-Pen. Samsung were quicker than most in updating the Galaxy Note to Ice Cream Sandwich and they introduced some tweaks to TouchWiz along with it. Now though, Android 4.2 is upon us and it’s expected for our smartphones to be updated to at least Android 4.1, bringing the headlining features of Jelly Bean with it.
The Galaxy Note has been slated to get an update to Jelly Bean but it hasn’t always seemed a priority for Samsung, who can blame them? They have the Galaxy S III and the more popular Galaxy S II to take care of first. However, Samsung have gotten good at supporting their whole product line-up, which is more than we can say for HTC et al. Now, there are a couple of pieces of information that suggests an update to Jelly Bean is closer than we first thought.
Firstly, there is the update Jelly Bean manual for the Galaxy Note which shows off Google Now features. Now was obviously a big part of last year’s I/O reveal of Jelly Bean. Samsung UK have the manual hosted on their support pages and have it labelled “JellyBean” so its clear the plans to update the device are pretty much finalized. Secondly, the Canadian carrier TELUS have the update marked as “pending” in their update schedule and they plan to roll the update out starting February. So, while all signs point to a long wait, it’s good to see that Samsung plan to make good on their promise.
The update should bring with it the speed improvements of Project Butter, Google Now and expandable notifications. Whether or not Samsung are going to update the device with the TouchWiz Nature UX as they did with the Galaxy S II is something we’ll have to wait to see but, we’re hoping so.
[Via: Android Authority]