Beautiful Widgets for Android

CNET Editors' review

by: Jaymar Cabebe on July 15, 2011

Beautiful Widgets outfits your Android OS with exactly what its name promises. It gives you the power to customize your Home screen with various-size clocks and weather widgets, plus smaller Toggle widgets that activate Wi-Fi, vibrate, plane mode, brightness, and more. The app also lets you customize appearance settings like widget text color and background transparency.

The free Beautiful Widgets Lite is bare bones. It comes with different clocks and weather widgets, but no Toggle widgets, Battery widget, or Accuweather services. And most importantly, it lacks access to skins, which could be something of a deal breaker, considering the skins really provide the bulk of your customization options. If you really want to make your Android Home screen sing, better to upgrade.

The paid full version has it all. With an ever-growing database of skins available for download, it lets you really get creative with your Home screen. Simply scroll through the Skins menus (for any type of widget), find one you like, and hit Download. Your selection will automatically be saved to your SD card for easy application whenever you're ready. We liked the Cardboard Weather skin, Brushed Metal, and Jeans Fabric. And because the entire database is free, we downloaded them all.

What's more, you can also activate some animated weather action by downloading the free BW Animation Package add-on. It's a neat, albeit battery-draining option that brings weather readings to life on your screen.

Overall, we loved Beautiful Widgets because of its incredible flexibility. It lets you customize so many different aspects of your widgets, plus it gives you access to a huge selection of skins (if you upgrade to the full version). If your Android Home screen is in major need of some flavor, we highly recommend downloading this app. And do your Android device a favor by springing a couple of bucks for the paid version.