Thirteen Android Widgets You Can Not Live Without

Wednesday, July 13, 2011 Posted by Aman Jain


One of the biggest advantages of Android over iphone are widgets. Android has them, iPhone does not. Widgets are valuable because they can provide at-a-glance look at lots of different kinds of information and quick access to valuable apps and configuration settings.


Note: A couple things to keep in mind with widgets


1.) They can sometimes hog resources, Bandwidth and battery life so you should make sure you’re using a task killer to regularly refresh your apps

2.) Widgets can take up a lot of screen real estate and so you need to use an alternate home screen launcher, such as launcher pro, to give yourself some extra space.


1 Analytics Widget

If you use Google Analytics to track Web site, this little widget makes easy to get a quick glance at your traffic metrics. It takes up the same amount of space as an app icon and you can set up multiple widgets to track multiple metrics.


2 Last Call

This widget provides a glance at your last call which makes it easy to redial or to call back a missed call .You can also click on the widget to go to your call log.


3 Flight view

For travellers, the flight view widget is very handy. Rather can digging through apps or web pages to get a flight status update, you can enter your airline and flight number into this app and it will track it for u.


4 Score Board

This is Google widget that let you keep track of the scores from a favourite sports team. It shows the last game and the next game (or current game).


5 3G Watch Dog

As most people are aware, Unlimited Bandwidths data plans are not unlimited. Most of them have the limit of 2 GB that means people are going to be more conscious of band with usage. The 3G watch dog is a Widget that can track it for you.


6 System Info

This widget provides a great little system monitoring function for battery life, overheating, memory and storage.


7 Pure Calendar

There is built in widget that can provide quick glance at your calendar but pure calendar is far more detailed and customizable.


8 Pure Messengers

The cousin of Pure calendar is pure messenger, which can provide a quick glance at your inbox. It can even integrate SMS Messages, Twitter DM’s and Facebook mail.


9 Extended Controls

Android comes with a "power control" widget that lets you quickly toggle Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Brightness and more. The "Extended controls" widget, allows you to create a customized version of power control with lot more toggle options


10 Battery watcher

This widget visually indicates battery percentage.

11 Picture Dial

This is a smart phone speed dial at allows you to setup your most important and most frequently dialled people or numbers based on photos .You see the two sides of the widget , one with two numbers and one with four .You can also stack multiple widget on the same page. The default configuration is that you select a contact and then phone, text or email to the speed dial button .


12 BuzzBox


BuzzBox offers a no frills widget for quickly glancing at the news. There are a bunch of pre-configured RSS sources (including some good ones for tech) and you can easily add your own.


13 SMS Unread count

The basic premise here is that this widget replaces your messaging (sms) icon with a widget that looks like a icon but includes a little red circle in the upper right corner with the number of unread messages you have (mirroring the iphone UI) The App can also do this for Gmail and Phone ( missed calls).


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