10 Great Widgets to Try on Your Android Phone

One way Android remains unique from other popular mobile phone operating systems is its embrace of app widgets. Widgets on your home screen and lock screen can provide quick ways of viewing and accessing real-time information. Oh, and they can look pretty elegant, too.

Here are 10 great news, weather, notes, and utility widgets for Android that we think are worth trying.

(Since Yahoo Tech is a property of Yahoo, we won’t be featuring Yahoo’s widgets on this list. You can click these links to check them out: Yahoo Sports and Yahoo Weather.)

Clocks/weather1. Beautiful Widgets has a great, theme-able weather/clock combo widget. You can also purchase the full version for $1.99 to unlock complete customization of things like fonts and background colors.

2. A pretty neat bit of flair, the Animated Analog Clock Widget ticks along like a regular wall clock.

3. It’s hard to find a more full-featured and detailed weather widget than 1Weather, and for free, to boot.

News4. Scrollable News Widget loads the RSS news feeds of your choice in a clean and simple scrollable timeline right on your phone’s home screen.

5. For those who rely on reddit forums for news, we suggest Reddinator. This scrollable widget will show you all the top stories in the subreddit of your choosing.

Notes6. Google’s own note-taking app, Google Keep, offers a pretty nice widget, showing your newest saved lists, notes, and photos, as well as giving you quick-access buttons to jot something down on the spot.

7. The Evernote Widget is a must-have for Evernote lovers. It gives you a quick glance of your recently viewed documents, as well as shortcuts to app settings and things like creating new notes and reminders.

Utilities8. If you’re sick of scrolling through your vast collection of apps to get to the one you’re looking for, you’ll probably love App Dialer. Reminiscent of the old flip phone T9 method, just key in the first few letters of the app you want, and boom, there it is.

9. To put a customizable set of system settings shortcuts on your phone’s home screen, try Slider. Via the widget, you can change ringer and system volumes, or adjust screen brightness, all without having to navigate through several settings screens.

10. The NiLS widget displays all your latest notifications right on your lock screen so that you don’t have to unlock your device or pull down the notifications panel to get a peek at what’s going on. Touching a particular alert and unlocking the phone will also bring you right into the associated app.