The option to check your latest email, messaging and social media notifications/feeds on your phone via homescreen widgets is one of the things the Android platform is revered for. Fresh to the Google Play Store, BlingBoard is a slick and beautifully designed Android homescreen widget that adds a bit of style to the aforementioned concept, and lets you view your latest missed calls, unread text messages, emails, Facebook and Twitter feeds under one roof. The widget is a collection of five main tabs that provide you easy and instant access to notifications pertaining to each of the aforementioned categories without requiring you to launch apps for each. You can view the 20 latest updates within each category, call your contacts back, send a quick reply to received text messages, and post directly to your Facebook Wall and Twitter timeline.

As with most of the apps these days, BlingBoard, too, welcomes its users with a couple of tutorial screens that depict using the various aspects of the app. Apart from displaying a notification count for the unread updates over each individual tab, BlingBoard also shows brief content relevant to each notification, and should your received messages’ length fall within the supported character count of 140, you don’t need to resort to any alternative means to check your texts, mails or social feeds. In addition, you can tap the paint brush icon in the bottom-right corner of the widget to clear all recent unread notifications at once.

To configure the widget, launch the app itself (from within the app drawer). The screen that follows displays login options for your Gmail, Facebook and Twitter accounts. Just authorize the widget to access all required account(s), set the automatic refresh interval for each, and you’re good to go. The minimum refresh interval supported for automatic updates is 30 minutes; far too long, especially for Twitter and Facebook. However, you can always manually refresh all content using the button in the top-right corner of the widget. In case there are no new notifications, the widget turns into a sleek digital clock (the same happens if you double-tap a tab).

BlingBoard: Social Widget is free in the Google Play Store, and requires Android v2.2 or higher to run. If you’re running Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich or higher, and are unable to see the widget upon installation, rebooting the device should solve the problem.

Download BlingBoard: Social Widget for Android

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