Google android tablet widgets' space, speed, and stability

There are a few issues you should keep in mind when setting up google android tablet widgets. The most obvious one: you might not be able to pack as many widgets on a single home screen as you might like. This is because of two Google design choices: relatively large borders on each home screen where widgets cannot be placed, and padding in the android tablet pc widget itself. These two design requirements lead to a relatively large amount of unusable white space on each home screen.

 

A second issue is that android tablet pc widgets are service hogs. You might see extremely slow or even failed widget information refreshes on a 3G wireless data connection. The screenshot below illustrates problems I had while using AT&T 3G service via an iPhone 4 tethering service. Two of the news apps needed several minutes to display. AT&T was delivering a reasonable 1 Mbps downstream speed at the time.

Android tablet pc widgets can use more battery life than you might think. Weather widgets are notorious for this, as they frequently turn on and use GPS location services to give you local conditions. The battery and data consumption problems are also endemic on phones; if you have a problem with excessive battery or bandwidth drain, widgets are a good first avenue of investigation.

Finally, lots of android tablet pc widgets can make the OS unstable. My casual observation: each widget added to a home screen increases the likelihood that apps, widgets, or Android components such as the window manager will crash.

Widgets that are buggy or draw a lot of data from the Internet can take a while to load and affect android tablet pc system performance.

Despite these issues, it's well worth the time and effort to experiment with widgets on your Android tablet. They're convenient and can increase your productivity. Just don't go widget-happy. Find the right balance between your needs and resources, and you and widgets should get along just fine.