Best Widgets for your Android Phone this 2013

If you own an Android phone, your home screen doesn’t have to be a boring grid of apps. By adding some widgets, you can see all kinds of information and perform certain actions directly from the home screen.

1. Car Widget is a scrollable list of extra-large icons, providing easier access to the apps, contacts and shortcuts you use most while driving.
2. Dashclock is a highly customizable widget for showing all kinds of information in one place, including the time, weather, battery life and unread e-mail counts. Users can expand the functionality even more with Dashclock extensions, such as AnyDash.
3. Eye in Sky (formerly WeatherEye) is a weather app for Android.
4. Google Drive Shortcuts widgets that will let you jump directly into a file or folder on Google Drive.
5. Flipboard it shows a headline and image from one story at a time, which you can swap out for another one by hitting the refresh button.
6. Google Now shows your latest updates from the service, such as the weather, upcoming flights, calendar appointments and traffic on your commute home.
7. Holo Bulb  – No more fumbling around for the flashlight app. Just add this 1-by-1 widget to your home screen and you can quickly toggle the LED flash bulb on your phone.
8. ESPN ScoreCenter – widget that lets you stay up to date on sports scores, and lets you see your favorite teams’ scores with one tap.
9. Screen Timeout Toggle – a simple toggle for keeping your screen from shutting off.
10. Simple Calendar Widget -this widget provides a resizeable, slick-looking view of your agenda. It also hooks into GTasks and Astrid to show items from your to-do list.
11. Slider Widget gives you volume readings on all kinds of audio — along with a bonus brightness control — and lets you adjust them right from the home screen.
12. SoundHound ID Now can identify any song just by listening to it, which comes in handy when you hear a good song on the radio or at a bar.
13. ICS Voice Search Shortcut – this 1-by-1 button takes you right into the Google app and begins a voice search.

The 13 Best Android Widgets for 2013 by Jared Newman [via techland.time.com]