By Brandon Miniman

Google’s announcement of Android 4.1 Jelly Bean touched on a ton of new features and improvements to the how the platform operates. Now that the SDK is available for developers, we fired-up the Android emulator to get a hands-on look for ourselves at some of those changes.

We delve into the new automatic widget resizing, including reposition of existing app icons. Jelly Bean gives apps much greater freedom with how they present notification alerts to the user, including those that allow the user to perform actions; while we can’t see all that new stuff in action without some JB-supporting apps, we do take a look at changes to the tray’s appearance.

The new JB keyboard is present, and we investigate its ability to predict words before you even get to them. Unfortunately, all the new Google Now features aren’t available in the SDK preview at the moment, but take a look for yourself below to see just how much of Jelly Bean we can already start experimenting with.

To get the emulator working for yourself:

1. Download the Android SDK from developer.android.com and install all Packages, especially API 16
2. In the SDK folder, open AVD Manager
3. Click New
4. Type a name, select Android 4.1 as the target, chose your screen resolution
5. Click create, then click Start