Kobo, a global leader in eReading, today announced its Android? 4.1 Jelly Bean firmware update for Kobo's award-winning 7" Google-certified Kobo Arc tablet. This update optimizes the user experience with faster performance, improved search capabilities, increased touch responsiveness, and additional intelligence features to help organize and streamline information with actionable notifications. The update is now available to Kobo Arc customers when they next connect to Wi Fi.
"Kobo Arc is the perfect tablet for people who love consuming books, movies, and surfing the web," said Wayne White, EVP of Devices, Kobo. "With the latest Jelly Bean update, Kobo Arc becomes the perfect eReading companion that offers more with intelligent search recommendations, voice-to-text, and a highly responsive touch screen."
Key Android 4.1 Jelly Bean features and benefits include:
Google Now?: Perfect for on-the-go Kobo Arc users looking for an easy way to organize their busy schedules, Google Now personalizes information based on a user's location, time of day, history, and calendar events. Google Now shows restaurants in the area, how much traffic to expect before the morning commute, when the next train is coming, the score of a current game, a flight status, and more.
Richer notifications: Kobo Arc users will never miss a beat due to a richer notification experience. They can now receive action notifications directly within the notifications area as well as expand and collapse notifications to display more or less detail.
Improved search: Finding online content has never been easier with text or voice searches, which are now presented in a visually rich way. Google Search can be opened directly from the locked screen by swiping up and users have the option to simply say "Google" to activate Voice Search within the Google Search screen.
Optimized voice recognition and boosted predictive typing: To complement speech-enabled online searches, Jelly Bean introduces impressive text-to-speech capabilities and an embedded speech recognizer that enables voice typing without an Internet connection. For those who prefer typing, an all-new keyboard lets them swipe to text.
Face Unlock: Keeping the Kobo Arc secure has never been easier with the improved Face Unlock, which now calibrates in different conditions and can now optionally require a blink to verify that a live person is unlocking the device. In addition, users can feel safer with improvements in malware blocking.
