15 Android widgets that will make iPhone users jealous

By Jason Hiner

One of the biggest advantages of Android over iPhone is widgets. Android has them, iPhone does not.

Widgets are valuable because they give you an at-a-glance look at lots of different kinds of information and quick access to valuable apps and configuration settings.

I carry both an Android phone (for work) and an iPhone (my private phone), but there are some things where I always reach to whip out the Android phone because I can access the information more quickly via a widget. If I was a normal person that only used one phone and I was limited to an iPhone, widgets are the biggest thing I’d miss about Android.

To help you find some of the most useful widgets, I’ve put together my list of the top 15. I first published this list of my favorite widgets in August 2010. In this latest update, I’ve replaced 12 out of the 15 widgets on the list and I’ve updated the screenshots for Android 4.0 “Ice Cream Sandwich.”

The best way to view this list is in the screenshot gallery so that you can see each of the widgets. But, you can also view it in list form below, with links to the Android Market for each of the widgets. I’ve tried to find widgets that will generally work on almost all versions of Android and aren’t limited to specific flavors, but obviously that’s a tall order.

A couple things to keep in mind with widgets:

1. They can hog resources, bandwidth, and battery life so you should make sure you’re using a task monitor to keep an eye on them; I wouldn’t necessarily recommend running all 15 at once, just pick the ones that are most important and that you’ll use the most often
2. Widgets can take up a lot of screen real estate and so you may need to use an alternate home screen launcher, such as Launcher Pro, to give yourself some extra space

Screenshot gallery

The 15 most useful Android smartphone widgets

1. Beautiful Widgets

Arguably, the most well-known widget on Android is the Clock & Weather widget from HTC, but that’s obviously limited to HTC devices. The best universal Android widget that does the same thing is the one from Beautiful Widgets, which also offers the same functionality in a variety of differences sizes and configurations and tosses in a few bonus widgets such as a battery monitor and some configuration toggles.

2. Extended Controls

Android comes with a “Power Control” widget that I’ve always liked because it lets you quickly toggle Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Brightness, and more. However, the “Extended Controls” widget allows you to create a customized version of Power Control with a lot more toggle options.

3. Business Calendar

If you need to quickly scan your calendar to check on your next meeting or see what your day looks like tomorrow, you can’t beat the Business Calendar widget. It offers virtually every size and configuration option imaginable. I prefer the 4×4 (full screen) widget in agenda mode with the simple list of all upcoming calendar appointments.

4. Analytics Widget

If you use Google Analytics to track web site traffic, this little widget makes it easy to get a get 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.

5. Google Reader ticker

To keep an eye on the latest news, it’s hard to beat Google Reader, since it’s completely customizable based on RSS feeds. You can follow national politics or world news or you can follow the smallest trade publication that covers your industry. As long as it has an RSS feed, you can put it in Google Reader and then you can follow it at a glance with the ticker widget that is automatically added when you install the Google Reader app.

6. Pulse

Pulse is another news reader that has a great widget. Pulse is a visual newsreader that represents stories with images that it finds within those stories. It has a nice default news feeds to choose from, but you can also search for lots of others from across the web. The widget only allows you to select on feed to use on its ticker.

7. Tripit

I’ve recommended Tripit on my favorite iPhone and Android apps lists because it’s a great little service for tracking all of your travel itineraries. It also happens to have a useful Android widget that comes in two sizes.

8. Google Finance

The simple mission of Google Finance is to track stocks. The app also comes with a widget that allows you to quickly glance at the performance of a single stock or index in a little 2×1 widget. You can have use multiple instances of the widget to track multiple stocks.

9. Direct Dial & Direct Message

In addition to quick-glance information, Android widgets can also provide quick functions (kind of like macros or keyboard shortcuts on a PC). The Direct Dial and Direct Message widgets allow you to pick someone’s phone number in your contacts and create an icon that allows you to immediately call or text that person. If you have a photo for the person then it shows their photo in a 1×1 icon. These two widgets come with Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich (that’s why there’s no download link), but if you don’t have a phone with ICS then you can use a widget like Picture Dial.

10. The Weather Channel

The weather update in Beautiful Widgets (above) is usually enough for me, but if I’m going on a trip or worried about the extended forecast and I want to track the weather a little more closely than The Weather Channel’s has a great set of widgets. My favorite is the 4×1 widget.

11. Google Docs bar

The Google Docs app comes with a widget bar that provides one-tap access to your list of docs and your favorites and also let’s you start a new document or add a photo to your docs with a single tap.

12. Evernote bar

Evernote is a great note-taking service that has multiple mobile apps as well as desktop apps and web access. The great thing is that you can make notes in any of these places and it gets synced to all of the other instances. The Evernote app for Android comes with a widget bar (similar to Google Docs) that gives you one-tap access to your notes, lets you search your notes, and lets you quickly create a new note.

13. Twitter

As I’ve said before, Twitter is a terrific real-time intelligence engine. Now that there’s an official Twitter Android app, there are also a couple Twitter widgets (large and small) for scanning your Twitter stream. You can even configure the Twitter widget to display “Mentions” so that you can quickly see who’s talking to you (or about you) and respond.

14. ESPN ScoreCenter

This ESPN widget that lets you keep track of the scores from your favorite sports teams. It shows the last game and the next game (or current game). You can quickly tap it to get more details in the ESPN app.

15. Dictionary.com

For my fellow wordsmiths out there, Dictionary.com has a terrific widget that allows you to type or speak a word and quickly get the definition. As a bonus, the widget also displays a word of the day.

The future of IT will be reduced to three kinds of jobs

By Jason Hiner

There’s a general anxiety that has settled over much of the IT profession in recent years. It’s a stark contrast to the situation just over a decade ago. At the end of the 1990s, IT pros were the belles of the ball. The IT labor shortage regularly made headlines and IT pros were able to command excellent salaries by getting training and certification, job hopping, and, in many cases, being the only qualified candidate for a key position in a thinly-stretched job market. At the time, IT was held up as one of the professions of the future, where more and more of the best jobs would be migrating as computer-automated processes replaced manual ones.

Unfortunately, that idea of the future has disappeared, or at least morphed into something much different.

The glory days when IT pros could name their ticket evaporated when the Y2K crisis passed and then the dot com implosion happened. Suddenly, companies didn’t need as many coders on staff. Suddenly, there were a lot fewer startups buying servers and hiring sysadmins to run them.

Around the same time, there was also a general backlash against IT in corporate America. Many companies had been throwing nearly-endless amounts of money at IT projects in the belief that tech was the answer to all problems. Because IT had driven major productivity improvements during the 1990s, a lot of companies over-invested in IT and tried to take it too far too fast. As a result, there were a lot of very large, very expensive IT projects that crashed and burned.

When the recession of 2001 hit, these massively overbuilt IT departments were huge targets for budget cuts and many of them got hit hard. As the recession dragged out in 2002 and 2003, IT pros mostly told each other that they needed to ride out the storm and that things would bounce back. But, a strange thing happened. IT budgets remained flat year after year. The rebound never happened.

Fast forward to 2011. Most IT departments are a shadow of their former selves. They’ve drastically reduced the number of tech support professionals, or outsourced the help desk entirely. They have a lot fewer administrators running around to manage the network and the servers, or they’ve outsourced much of the data center altogether. These were the jobs that were at the center of the IT pro boom in 1999. Today, they haven’t totally disappeared, but there certainly isn’t a shortage of available workers or a high demand for those skill sets.

That’s because the IT environment has changed dramatically. More and more of traditional software has moved to the web, or at least to internal servers and served through a web browser. Many technophobic Baby Boomers have left the workforce and been replaced by Millennials who not only don’t need as much tech support, but often want to choose their own equipment and view the IT department as an obstacle to productivity. In other words, today’s users don’t need as much help as they used to. Cynical IT pros will argue this until they are blue in the face, but it’s true. Most workers have now been using technology for a decade or more and have become more proficient than they were a decade ago. Plus, the software itself has gotten better. It’s still horribly imperfect, but it’s better.

So where does that leave today’s IT professionals? Where will the IT jobs of the future be?

1. Consultants

Let’s face it, all but the largest enterprises would prefer to not to have any IT professionals on staff, or at least as few as possible. It’s nothing personal against geeks, it’s just that IT pros are expensive and when IT departments get too big and centralized they tend to become experts at saying, “No.” They block more progress than they enable. As a result, we’re going to see most of traditional IT administration and support functions outsourced to third-party consultants. This includes a wide range from huge multi-national consultancies to the one person consultancy who serves as the rented IT department for local SMBs. I’m also lumping in companies like IBM, HP, Amazon AWS, and Rackspace, who will rent out both data center capacity and IT professionals to help deploy, manage, and troubleshoot solutions. Many of the IT administrators and support professionals who currently work directly for corporations will transition to working for big vendors or consultancies in the future as companies switch to purchasing IT services on an as-needed basis in order to lower costs, get a higher level of expertise, and get 24/7/365 coverage.

2. Project managers

Most of the IT workers that survive and remain as employees in traditional companies will be project managers. They will not be part of a centralized IT department, but will be spread out in the various business units and departments. They will be business analysts who will help the company leaders and managers make good technology decisions. They will gather business requirements and communicate with stakeholders about the technology solutions they need, and will also be proactive in looking for new technologies that can transform the business. These project managers will also serve as the company’s point of contact with technology vendors and consultants. If you look closely, you can already see a lot of current IT managers morphing in this direction.

3. Developers

By far, the area where the largest number of IT jobs is going to move is into developer, programmer, and coder jobs. While IT used to be about managing and deploying hardware and software, it’s going to increasingly be about web-based applications that will be expected to work smoothly, be self-evident, and require very little training or intervention from tech support. The other piece of the pie will be mobile applications — both native apps and mobile web apps. As I wrote in my article, We’re entering the decade of the developer, the current changes in IT are “shifting more of the power in the tech industry away from those who deploy and support apps to those who build them.” This trend is already underway and it’s only going to accelerate over the next decade.