Check out the latest and greatest in apps for your Android smartphone with our monthly app roundup.
Beautiful Widgets
Not a misnomer.Beautiful Widgets is an app I’ve been hearing about for years now, but it wasn’t until the glorious ‘10 billion downloads’ Market sale in back in December that I actually tried it out. I must say, it lives up to its name.
The app provides you with a selection of beautiful widgets, ranging in size from 1 x 1 to up to 4 x 3 (resizeable in Honeycomb or above), any of which can display a combination of time, date, battery, weather or settings toggles. The included widgets all have an attractive, minimalistic style, but what really makes this app great are the downloadable user-created skins. Like all user-submitted content, some of the skins are simply gorgeous, while others risk curdling the jelly in your eyeballs. However, the attractive-to-baffling ratio is quite good.
You can customise the placement of the main weather icon, and choose which app launches when you click on the hours or minutes of the clock. It also includes a free weather animation add-on that gives you a functional, attractive full-screen weather forecast by clicking on the sun. The full-screen weather shows the seven-day forecast based on either your current or specified location, and can be toggled to show the moon phase.
$2.49 > LevelUp Studio > Link Flick Golf!
In Flick Golf! you’re given a set amount of time to hit as many shots (from the tee) as possible, with points awarded based on your distance from the hole. In this way, it’s like a blend of darts and golf.
You flick upward to send the ball flying, then you flick the ball in the air to give it curve or back/forespin (I triple-checked for a typo there). You get bonus points for effective control in the air, while points are deducted for landing in obstacles. Serenely addictive.
99c > Full Fat > Link APNdroid
An OG Android app from way back, APNdroid’s utility is still as relevant four years on. It’s a simple way to toggle data on and off – either via the app or a one-click widget – helping save battery life or dollar bills (y’all).
Its most useful feature, however, is its ability to be called from other apps, including Locale, Tasker and even some telco data/account monitoring tools (for example, I have Telstra Usage disable data when my remaining quota dips below 100MB).
$1.85 > Martin Adamek > Link TileStorm HD
A classic tile puzzler of the sort that I seemingly never grow tired of. Usual deal here: arrange the tiles to make an unimpeded path for the impractically designed, legless robot to reach the other side of his Sisyphean space-platform/hell.
Although it starts slow, in later levels blocks gain different properties, maps have multiple solutions and tiles will need to be reused. The graphics are nice enough, the controls effective, the environments quirky (space, Egypt, medieval and jungle), and – most importantly – the puzzles challenging.
$3.99 > Jakyl > Link 