I eagerly pushed the new Beautiful Widgets update Tuesday morning, but wanted to spend a day with it before reporting on it or before giving my thoughts. I was ready to write something immediately, but I had a few issues with the update and it was such a stark change from the prior version that it deserved a day's testing. This is my rundown of the good, the bad, and the ugly with this vast new update.

First, to be clear, I feel an overhaul of this magnitude is sometimes merited. I believe that applies in this case with the update to Beautiful Widgets 5. I had gotten to a point where the widgets were stale and no amount of themeing would make it fun. I had been using other widgets on my home screen for quite some time. With the new update comes a brand new interface and I think most of us enjoy the challenge of a new adventure. Perhaps LevelUp studio should have considered making this a separate application though, allowing for the classic version and this new version. That remains to be discussed.

I first noticed that my classic themes were gone. In it's place are newer and refreshed themes. I was both disturbed and encouraged by this. Perhaps Beautiful Widgets has mastered the art of completely going backwards and forwards at the same time with their update. Second, I noticed a new weather screen. Finally! Out of all of the changes within the widget itself, the new weather interface tied into the Holo interface has to be the most refreshing change I've seen in a while. I was even able to find, for the most part, most of my old but now refreshed themes. Also overdue was an expandable notification in Jellybean which now works great.

I was then quickly frustrated to have to reconfigure the application, restoring Fahrenheit, the 12 hour clock, animations, refresh time, etc. I again thought this should be Beautiful Widgets 2, and I would have no problem starting from scratch. Once I updated my settings and found the right themes, I was finally able to start running the application through it's courses.

At first glance, my locale was completely obscured by my weather themes. It was not noticeable before, but with the new version, the weather themes consume my date and location. Some themes were gigantic in proportion and some were entirely too small. There was no inversion for high and low temperatures, but I read in the forums that they are working on that, so I can patiently wait.

Finally I found myself waiting for my widget to update. I had a message stating "On Migration" constantly which became a great source of frustration. After going to their support forums, I found that if I cleared data on Beautiful Widgets, that it would go away. The application attempts to migrate themes from the old version to the new apparently and it fails for some users. It failed for me, but after I cleared the data and started completely from scratch, that message went away. Of course, going back to square one after my first frustrating bout was minor injury added to insult.

Once I was able to get the widget set up to my liking, the widget has worked well. I still get that new 1.0 feeling instead of a 5.0 feeling running and using Beautiful Widgets. I feel there have been enough enhancements for me to return it to my home screen for now. Perhaps that's just the novelty of the new version. I'm confident LevelUp Studios will listen to our concerns and squash these bugs quickly. It's still one of the most popular applications across the entire Android platform.

What are your thoughts about the update? Did you have a frustrating experience like I did, or has the update run flawlessly for you? Do you feel this was a necessary upgrade or should they have worked harder to preserve their existing interfaces? I can take the bad with the good, but would like to hear what you think. Judging from recent reviews and their support forums, there is a very vocal group of unsatisfied users. The overall experience has already improved considerably since the initial release earlier in the week thanks to several updates. I think they're baking something pretty darn good.