After digging into settings menus in the Jelly Bean update that was released this week for Verizon’s Galaxy Nexus, a handful of readers noticed that a new “Cell Broadcast settings” area was now included. This new area appears to give you control over emergency alerts that could push through to your handset. For example, a child abduction notification could appear on your phone should one happen near you. I’m assuming that a notification of some sort would also pop up if say a hurricane were blowing through, if an earthquake just went down, or if some sort of terrorist activity that threaten lives was happening. You can even set your phone up to speak them out loud as they appear on your device.

We hadn’t noticed these on any other phone before, even a GSM Galaxy Nexus running Jelly Bean, and wanted to share. We aren’t sure if this is something that is only showing because this is a test build or if this is indeed going to be a new standard in Android going forward. Pretty neat, though, right?

To access the menu, head into Settings>Wireless & networks>Cell broadcasts.

Cheers Steven and 4n1m4l!