Ever since their introduction in Android 4.2 Jelly Bean, lock screen widgets have been lauded and loathed almost equally by Android users from all across the globe. While some cite the feature as an easy means for intruders to access your personal information, others relish the convenience with which they’re able to take a peek at crucial information without having to unlock their devices. If you’re one of the supporters of lockscreen widgets, we might have found an ideal replacement of the stock clock widget for you in DashClock. Developed by one of the leading design engineers of the Android team, Roman Nurik, DashClock is a neatly-designed and customizable Android clock widget capable of displaying a wealth of additional information right on your device’s home and lock screens. Let’s find out all about this handy widget after the jump.

Using the various extensions of the widget, you can keep a close tab on the current local weather, upcoming calendar appointments, next scheduled alarm as well as unattended text messages, missed calls & emails on both your home screen and lock screen.

Besides replicating the looks of the stock Android 4.2 clock lockscreen widget, DashClock also builds functionality of almost all the stock widgets including Calendar, Gmail, Messaging and even more in a single package. This way, you can keep a watch on all this info from the same lockscreen instead of setting up and sifting through multiple ones with solitary widgets. The widget’s idea seems to have been inspired from the ‘Chronus’ widget that comes bundled with the latest Android 4.2 builds of CyanogenMod ROM.

Configuring the widget is pretty simple. When you add the DashClock widget on your Android device’s home screen or lock screen, you’re presented with the option to personalize the widget in terms of appearance as well as extensions. For the former, the widget offers you various digital clock designs. To be honest, there isn’t much to get excited about in terms of the designs on offer, as they are nothing more than various combinations of date and time views rendered in bold and normal fonts.

When it comes to the various DashClock extensions however, things start getting really interesting. Not only can you add several of the aforementioned extensions to the widget to display their pertaining information, you can also set their order of display on the widget, and customize a few options for some of those extensions as well. For instance, you can toggle between Celsius and Fahrenheit temperature units for the weather extension, whereas the Gmail extension can be set to display unread items from either your Inbox or Priority Inbox. In case you have multiple Google accounts configured on your device, you can also choose the one(s) you want the widget to display the unread mail count from.

Oddly enough, tapping the clock or alarm extension on the widget doesn’t navigate to their respective apps. However, all other extensions can be tapped to unlock directly to their corresponding apps. In the future, we can expect to see other extensions (possibly third-party ones as well) that can further expand the functionality of the widget.

Remember that DashClock is compatible with Android 4.2 Jelly Bean and higher devices only. You can grab the app for free from the Play Store link provided below.

Download DashClock For Android

Update: DashClock v1.3 brings the option to select the calendars you wish to see the events from. In addition, your favorite lockscreen widget can now show you the location of your next appointment, and help you quickly access the Play Store search screen to look for the latest DashClock extensions released by worldwide developers.

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