Jelly Bean, the “buttery smooth” upgrade to the still-rather-elusive Ice Cream Sandwich has been confirmed for HTC’s One X, One S and One XL, though the HTC has offered no exact dates.
HTC has fallen well behind fellow Android supporter Samsung, so it can only help the smartphone maker to be the first to announce that several of its devices will soon receive the upgrade to Google’s Android 4.1, known as Jelly Bean.
Ever since it launched in November 2009, the HTC HD2, which runs Windows Mobile 6.5 out of the box, has been hacked over and over again. We’ve seen it running Windows Phone 7, Android 2.2 (Froyo), Android 2.3 (Gingerbread), Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich), MeeGo, and even Ubuntu. Last week, Google open-sourced Android (Jelly Bean) 4.1 for third-party modification. As such, nobody should be surprised to HTC HD2 owners can now install Jelly Bean on the ancient phone that just won’t die.
Android 4.1, code-named Jelly Bean, is first OS from Google to correctly randomize memory, making it tougher for attackers to get a foothold.
Expect some notable security improvements in Android 4.1, code-named Jelly Bean. In particular, it will be the first version of Android to properly implement address space layout randomization (ASLR), thus foiling would-be kernel attackers.
Source code for Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean) has been released. We’re sure many of you will be downloading the new Android 4.1.1_r1 files simply to poke around, but CyanogenMod and countless other Android development groups around the globe will be spending countless hours pouring over every last line of code to see what changes will need to be made to integrate Jelly Bean into their existing code base.