Google announced availability of the SDK for Android 4.2, the new version of its Jelly Bean platform.

The new OS was introduced with Google’s recent Nexus product upgrade, although reports said it is also already being pushed out to owners of the older Galaxy Nexus smartphone.

Among the highlights noted by the company are enhancements for international users, with native RTL (right-to-left) functionality to enable better apps supporting languages such as Arabic, Hebrew and Persian. It also includes font and character optimisations for Korean, Japan, Indic, Thai, Arabic and Hebrew writing systems.

Other features include support for lock screen widgets, enabling apps to deliver content to the lock screen of an Android device. There's also an “interactive screensaver mode” called Daydream, which enables apps to display content when a device is on charge or docked.

Other enhancements in Android 4.2 include platform support for external displays which “go beyond mirroring”, enabling content to be sent to screens connected to an Android device.

And Google has also worked to run Renderscript computation directly in the GPU on the Nexus 10 tablet, which was said to be a “first for any mobile computation platform”.

Previously announced features of Android 4.2 include the ability for multiple users to share a single tablet, with each having a “dedicated user space”, and app verification, to enable users to screen apps before installation to check if it may be harmful.