The android reviews begin

Posted by Kevin Wednesday, December 9, 2009 0 comments

So, just recently I purchased an HTC Dream phone (T-mobile G1) which is the original Android phone that started the recent wave of Android based mobile devices as of late. Although the G1 has been on the market for about a year now, and is ancient by cell phone standards...I am still very impressed by it's capabilities, even compared to the newest line of Android based phones...but enough about the G1, I will have more on that later, you came to see the apps.

for the next few posts I will be reviewing some of my favorite Android apps that I have found so far. Some of these Applications have been out since the inception of the market, and some are fairly new. I will try to encompasses games, navigation, tools, UI enhancements, people finders, and place finders...mostly free, but a few paid apps.

Let's get to it! :

Beautiful Widgets (.99e ~ 1.34us)

Beautiful Widgets is exactly what it says it is, a collection of handy, handsome, widgets to embellish your home screens with added functionality and eye-candy.

Here are the included widgets:

on/off toggles for,

  • WiFi
  • Bluetooth
  • Plane mode
  • GPS
  • Silent mode
  • Vibrate mode
UI enhancements,
• Flip clock (non animated) with current weather conditions
and tap-able areas to set an unlimited amount of customizable
alarms, and 3-day forecast shortcut.
- Also includes a smaller version of this clock for those of you that
like to have a lot of app shortcuts on your main screen.

Most of the widgets included in this collection can be found for free either on their own, or in other widgets packages. What makes this collection stand out is the "Beautiful home" widget. This home widget is your shortcut to weather, and alarm functions...and is just darn pretty to boot. The widget was made to resemble the included home app on the HTC Hero (another excellent Android phone). Some weather apps take up quite a bit of memory, and data usage...but for the complexity of this widget it seems to be pretty slim on the memory use. As far as the data use, you can opt to have it only update manually, or at several hour intervals.


Overall I would give this app 4 out of 5 stars.

I rate it down because sometimes it seems to create some lag while coming back to the home screen.