BlingBoard brings Gmail, Facebook, Twitter and SMS together in one Android widget

There’s a fair chance that if you’re reading this, Gmail, Twitter and Facebook rank highly on your most-used apps list. And given that Android holds a majority or near-majority market share in many countries, there’s a good chance that you access these aforementioned applications via a Google-powered smartphone.

With that in mind, mobile app developers Jappka has developed BlingBoard, a widget that lets you monitor your emails, Facebook/Twitter feeds and your text messages all from one little box on your homescreen.

Once you download the app to your device, you’ll need to go to the main menu on your smartphone, click ‘add’, ‘widgets’ and then ‘BlingBoard’. You will also have to activate all your accounts with the application so that it can read all inbound messages.

The widget can load 20 messages at a time, for each of your accounts, with the latest one displaying first by default, and you use the little ‘back’ and ‘forward’ arrows to navigate through your streams.

As you can see here with the Facebook and Twitter screenshots, each has their own little icon in the bottom left which takes you direct to the message in question, so you can respond or share accordingly:

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The SMS and Gmail features behave in exactly the same way, letting you scroll through your most recent messages and then click to read the full message. The widget only displays 140 characters by default, so for email and text messages, there’s a good chance you will have to click through to read it in its entirety:

You’ll also see that there is a fifth icon – this lets you see any missed calls you’ve had on your mobile.

BlingBoard is a really nice, easy-to-use app that centralizes all your main communication activity. However, with a 20-message limit, this does have some inherent limitations built in that mean it won’t act as a complete substitute for your main apps.

Also, the minimum auto-update for your message streams is 30 minutes, meaning that you have to manually refresh it if you want to see more frequent updates. This isn’t a major hassle, but having a more regular auto-update feature would certainly be useful.

If nothing else, you can also use BlingBoard as your default clock on your homescreen, letting you navigate between your various accounts as and when required.

➤ BlingBoard