I know that Android usually makes us all think about little green puppies and robotic rainbows, but sometimes, things can’t always be so bright and sunny. Maybe your girlfriend just dumped you. Maybe you lost the chess tournament. Shoot, maybe you live in the South (like me!) and just wish it would rain once in a while!

If you find yourself in similar circumstances or just enjoy the doom and gloom a good thunderstorm brings, you’ve got to check out Thunderstorm Live Wallpaper.

Thunderstorm Live Wallpaper is an incredibly slick, detailed, and fairly realistic depiction of Mother Nature at her finest, and it runs really well, to boot.

Fortunately, you’re not stuck with a one-trick pony, as Thunderstorm Live Wallpaper boasts a pretty full settings menu. From there, you can set cloud count, bolt frequency, wind speed, camera speed, and bolt color. They’re all little things, but they’re the kind of little thing that helps you make your wallpaper experience both unique and totally your own.

I mean, shoot, red lightning? That’s too cool.

Thunderstorm Live Wallpaper is free in the Market, but there’s also a donate version for 99 cents, if you’re so inclined to show the developer some love. If you like lightning, storms, or are just looking for a new wallpaper to use, I’d definitely check out Thunderstorm Live Wallpaper.

A few more pictures as well as download links are after the break.

Android Market web link

Posted under Droid X Wallpapers

While we’re probably still years or decades away from getting our very own animatronic clones, Google’s released the next best thing for the time being. Available on the Android Market is this Androidify app, which, as the name says for itself, lets us mere mortals craft our very own Android mascot lookalikes. Hell, you can even slap on some facial hair or a baby droid while you’re at it. We’ll say no more — see the app in action after the break, if you’re not already busy dishing out your new avatar across the web.

Posted under Droid X Apps

Today seems to be the day for new Android apps to be hitting the Market! This time around it’s for all you sports lovers out there! Sports Illustrated, the popular sports magazine, is now available for both Android smartphones and Android tablets.

“This is a significant step in delivering Sports Illustrated’s award-winning journalism to sports fans everywhere and in any way they want it,” said Mark Ford, Time Inc. EVP and President of its Sports Group.

The app is free, but you’ll need a subscription to access the content:
- Print/Digital (Samsung Galaxy/Android Smartphone/Web): $48 annually or $4.99/month
- Digital Only: $3.99/month
- Current print subscribers have free access to the digital package throughout the remainder of their term

Since I knew you were going to ask, because Sports Illustrated is now almost synonymous with “the swimsuit edition”, according to their press release “there are also several new Swimsuit digital products, including 3D, coming out on February 15″, 2011.

Posted under Android News

Pocket Auctions for eBay is the award-winning eBay mobile application made even better for Android! Created by Bonfire Media, here are the features:

• My eBay
• Search active & completed items
• Full screen pictures
• Price check
• Bid & Buy it Now
• Android-style notofications
• Find great deals
• Scan barcodes on eBay
• Chat with fellow eBay’ers
• Supports USA and UK

Even though this app is not the official eBay app, it sure is action-packed as though it were!

Usefulness:

eBay Buyers and Sellers with an Android powered device would find Pocket Auctions for eBay extremely useful. This app allows you to Browse, Buy, and Sell your eBay items from your pocket!

Ease of Use:

That app is a very easy to use and optimized for Android.  Every feature is just a Tapp away.

Features:

Search

Search has 3 tabs: Active, Completed and Price Check. Active searches shows you results with real-time count downs. Completed shows items ending with 1 minute with real-time count downs (great for the savvy eBay buyer scooping up last mintue deals… literally!) Price Check shows a range; minimum, median and maximum most recent successful auctions meeting your searched item. In all, you can Place a Bid, Buy it Now or Watch items.

My Ebay

My eBay has three tabs: Watching, Buying, and Selling.  When you sign into your eBay account, it automatically fetches the information.  In each tab you can see full information detail such as Item description in Simple or HTML view.  An easy way to keep track of your eBay items!

Deals

The Deals section features the top 12 deals on eBay. Find items like GPS Navigation, 99-cent Mega deals, iPods, xBox 360′s, Blu-Ray DVDs and more.

Live Chat

Live Chat is a really cool feature, its broken into two categories: The Cafe and Users Q&A.  In The Cafe users can post simple messages to the community. Users Q&A is a place for users too ask questions and get answers right on the community board.

Scan

Pocket Auctions for eBay also has a bar code scanner; the interface is similar to Compare Everywhere. It scans the bar code against products in eBay’s product base. Surprisingly though, our scan yielded no results when we scanned a recently purchased iPod Shuffle. Using one of the other bar code scanners; Compare Everywhere or ShopSavvy spit back the results just fine. Could it be… no iPod Shuffles on eBay

Frequently Used:

With over 190 Million eBay members and nearly 1 million Android powered devices sold, it’s bound to be frequently used. Whether it be the eager first-time mom shopping for Elmo toys, the tech junkie searching the latest gadget deals, or power sellers compulsively checking their sales; it deems to be a top Android App.

Interface:

The interface is optimized for mobile use including icons, color-coded sections, tabs within sections, and you can easily get Home by tapping the Menu button.

Posted under Droid X Apps

As part of a commitment to increasing the portability and customization of Android, Google has been moving down the path towards removing core applications and moving them to the Android Market. One of the first apps to do this is YouTube, which recently saw a brand new “Gingerbread” version released via the Android Market. The problem is, this version is only available on Froyo (or higher, assumably) handsets. Cue the sappy violins for those with Android 2.1 and below.

But wait, there is a whole development community ready and willing to get dirty in the name of giving all Android users their fair share, and hacker rolle3k over at XDA has cracked and hacked the new YouTube app and ported it over for phones running Eclair. You are going to need to remove the version of YouTube currently present first, and that isn’t as easy a task as it sounds considering that older version is built deep into the OS. That’s where it gets tricky, but luckily you can head over to the XDA forums and get the app and instructions to go along with it if you are feeling froggy.

Posted under Droid X Apps

Tired of wading through dissertations in hopes of grokking a hacked-up method of overclocking your Droid X and / or Droid 2? Clearly, you aren’t alone. Unstable Apps has just released a $0.99 gem that enables one-tap overclocking on the aforementioned phones, with DX/D2 Overclocker giving users the option to run at low voltage, stock voltage or two higher-than-recommended voltages. Of course, given just how simple it is to potentially ruin your handset, we’d highly encourage using common sense and rational judgment when pushing the proverbial envelope. You know, the kind of judgment that convinces you to sing Bell Biv DeVoe’s Poison in a karaoke bar full of your closest colleagues.

Posted under Droid X Apps