Count down to 2012 on your home screen with this handy widget for Android. New Year Countdown Widget displays how many days, hours, minutes and even seconds until the new year. Surprisingly, the app is able to tailor your countdown to your timezone without requiring you to manually input it. Depending on your wallpaper, though, the widget can be difficult to see. However, tapping the countdown widget opens the app, providing a much larger display.   Less

One of the most difficult New Year’s resolutions to keep is probably also the most popular one. Lose It! for Android is a sensible diet and exercise tracker to help you maintain your weight loss goal throughout 2012, and even beyond. Unlike other calorie-counting apps, Lose It! uses an algorithm to help you determine a reasonable calorie cap to reach your ideal weight, or maintain your current size. After registering your account, the app prompts you to enter your current and ideal weight. After inputting how soon you’d like to achieve your goal, Lose It! tells you how many calories a day you should consume to help you reach your goal. After each meal, fill in what you ate and let Lose It! calculate the number of calories you consumed and have left. This app works best if you eat out a lot (which is not really conducive to weight loss, I think), since the Lose It! database has the most calorie information about restaurant- and not home-cooked- items. One of the better features of this app is its multi-tiered approach; instead of simply tracking your calorie count, you can also input the exercise you have done that day and Lose It! will consider your daily activity when calculating the amount of food you are allowed to consume that day.   Less

If you’re the kind of person who struggles to keep his or her New Year’s resolutions, Motivational Quotes for Android might be for you! Use Motivational Quotes as an app, or a widget, and customize how often you’d like a new one to appear. If used as a widget, you have the option of customizing the size of your quotes’ fonts, background and font color and even size. Once a quote generates, you can scroll past it and read more, or you can click on it to see it in a full-page view.   Less

To stop smoking is never easy, but maybe one of the best ways to quit is to understand exactly what makes you reach for that lighter. Quit Smoking for Android provides you with a cigarette “usage” chart after two days of logging your activity. Since I don’t smoke, I can’t comment on how effective this app really is, but I thought that asking you to measure your level of craving, as well as your stress level, will likely provide with some insight on your smoking habit that may help you quit.   Less

Another popular New Year’s resolution is to budget better. Moneywise, for Android, helps you track your expenses by providing a handy database for you to input your daily purchases. After you enter your expenses, Moneywise will graph your expenses by type so that you can see where the majority of your paycheck goes. Tab options let you view your purchases in list or graph form, and are laid out conveniently at the top of your app.   Less

Track your holiday shopping (and most importantly, budget) with Free Christmas List for Android. This app provides a database for you to input holiday gift recipients along with gift ideas and purchases, right into your phone. The app also provides you with a total spending summary so you can make sure your good intentions don’t make you go overboard.   Less

Gameloft has finally released a free version of UNO, the game you loved as a kid. Reverse, reverse, skip and make your friends draw four with this fast-paced version of an old favorite. You and your opponents (real or computer) are dealt your hands, then a card from the deck is played. If you are playing solo, against computerized opponents, you will always have to play first. If you don’t have a card that matches the color or number of the previous card played, you’ll have to draw. The only rule in the Android version of UNO I’m not familiar with is the “challenge” rule; if your opponent plays a Wild Card, you, or another player, can challenge him to prove he didn’t have a like-colored or like-numbered card to play instead. Whoever loses the challenge must draw more cards. The ads in this version appear at the top of the board and are pretty unobtrusive and difficult to accidentally click. Dragging the cards to play isn’t always easy, and occasionally requires multiple attempts.   Less

My biggest problem with this Rock Band-like app is that I have never heard of any of the songs on it. Featuring the likes of Lady Gaga, Katy Perry, Ke$ha and Linkin Park, Tap Tap Revenge 4 for Android lets you tap your touchscreen to the beat of the song you select. Three free songs are included in the multi-level app after your original download, though more free tracks can also be added. The download selection is scant, though, in terms of genre, but if you are a pop music aficionado, you will probably find several songs that are familiar enough to rock out to. Lucky for me, it is pretty easy to decipher when to tap based on the timeline, at least in Easy mode.    Less

Consolidate all your business contacts with CamCard for Android. The free version of this app lets you photograph business cards, then auto-fills the information into a contacts database. Since business card layouts are hardly standard, this app doesn’t always get it right, but each field can be easily edited, and doing so is probably far more convenient than carrying around a wallet bursting with other people’s business cards.   Less

Another bubble-shooting, or “zuma,” game is making the rounds of the Android market. In Crazy Garage, shoot at a rapidly-approaching line of multi-colored bubbles before they reach the end of the tube. Unlike other zuma games, there are special balls in Crazy Garage, which makes the game a little more exciting.    Less

I downloaded this app for inspiration while making hand-made holiday cards. There are almost 500 images in this wallpaper library, and I feel truly prepared for future craft endeavors after scrolling through about ten pages of them. Designs run the gamut, from kitschy to avant-garde to… parade photos. It’s easy to download the themes and set them to display as wallpaper right from the app. Oddly, the wallpapers I downloaded stretched to fill all my desktop screens instead of just displaying completely in one.    Less

This season, save when you do your Christmas shopping with Amazon’s Price Check app for Android. Find items in-store, then scan their barcode’s with Amazon’s Price Check app. Amazon will find you that product in its database, then issue you one $5 coupon good toward any purchase from their website.   Less

Santa’s Village for Android is a fun, seasonal take on popular society-building games like Sim City and Farmville. Playing this game requires a lot of memory, though. I could not download this app on my phone, which only has a 4GB memory card. Like in Farmville, players develop Santa’s village by building houses for elves, growing and decorating Christmas trees and earning enough points to perform tasks, like building toys to deliver to kids. Tasks can be set in advance, but make sure you set a timer to collect the fruits of your elves’ labors before Santa’s enemies, the Grumpkins, get their hands on them!   Less

Keep your kids busy and yourself entertained with MagicMarker for Android. This app lets you turn your touchscreen into a sketchpad, with a full color palette to choose from. MagicMarker records your touch screen swipes as images. There are only a few buttons on your sketchpad, but one of them has multiple share features that let you choose where on your phone you’d like to save your image, email it, or easily set it as your desktop image. If you click a second option in the share dropdown, you will be asked whether you’d like to browse more apps by Jaytronix on the Android market. When I declined, the MagicMarker app became very unresponsive, and didn’t allow me to perform any more functions on my current file.    Less

I know I’m late to the game where Fruit Ninja is concerned. This week, though, while attempting (unsuccessfully) to free up enough space on my phone to download Santa’s Village, I ended up deleting most of my apps and now I found myself in the surprising position of having no games on my phone. Enter Fruit Ninja. Though I downloaded the free version of this game, the Android market is celebrating its 10 billionth app download by practically giving away some of its most popular paid apps for just $.10. So try Fruit Ninja today and buy it on the cheap if you like it (the deal is only good until the December 15th). You might already know how the game is played, but if not, it’s pretty simple; swipe your touch screen to slice fruits as they fly into the air, but beware cutting open bombs which will cause your screen to explode (not really). Ads abound in the free version, appearing as soon as the app opens, to when you select your level, to after you’ve lost a round- in most cases, an appeal to compare your scores with other players’ on Openfeint social media. If you really like this game, take advantage of Android’s 10 cent special and make your purchase for the ad-free version soon.   Less

Frequent shoppers can reward themselves with shopkick, a free “points” program to help you save on future purchases. shopkick generates a list of featured items in your area, and every time you purchase one, you earn credits, or “kicks,” toward your next purchases. You do have to submit your phone number and your email address in order to redeem rewards, though the developer claims it does not share or sell your contact information to other companies. While shopkick may work better in larger cities, where there are more stores and shopping specials, for those of us living in rural America, this app may not be the most useful. While I’m all for saving money on grocery shopping, apps like this one force users to consume particular items, and they may not end up saving money at all.    Less

Share your memories with loved ones, even when they can’t be with you, with Path for Android. Path lets you share photos, drawings and videos with your contacts, with customizable “covers” for your journals. Path also syncs with social media, so you can share your location or any other information easily via Facebook, Twitter and even Foursquare.   Less

Compare prices and get the best deal on your favorite products, with ShopSavvy Barcode Scanner for Android. Just scan the barcodes of your favorite items in-store, and let ShopSavvy find them at other local retail stores, online, or check out its database of product reviews by Amazon shoppers. ShopSavvy probably works better in larger towns, and there is no way to add stores to the database (though you can add stores to your personal account). In Fort Morgan, Colo., for instance, this app only lists food items at Walgreens and Walmart, and never the Safeway. If you’re an online shopper, you will have better luck. This app provides a great deal of web options to help you save money on purchases, by listing sites where the product is available, again, in ascending order of price. There are no other sort options. This app also displays local specials, though they update so fast you might see an appealing special, only to have it disappear or move before you get a chance to click on it. Since there’s no way to search for specific product specials, the deals on ShopSavvy are best for the flexible shopper. Barcodes scan very accurately, though it took me a while to figure out the best way to scan a barcode while holding my phone vertically (the display does not rotate while this app is open).   Less

If we could figure out a way to force kids onto Glympse, all the time, this might be a good location-tracking app for parents. But Glympse is pitched as a business app- and I can think of very few scenarios where giving clients or coworkers unfettered access to your whereabouts (via a GPS map route) might come in useful. Glympse’s developers claim that the app can help you share your location on the go, without having to text or call while driving, but since setting up permissions for who can and can’t see your whereabouts (not to mention when, and for what duration of time- all customizable options) requires prior planning, this claim seems disingenuous. But even more embarrassing than this line of logic is Glympse’s commercial on the Android Market website, showing a family huddled around the computer, watching Dad’s drive home mapped before their eyes.    Less

If you were so busy watching sports, cooking or cleaning up on Thanksgiving that you missed the 2011 National Dog Show, you can catch it now on your Android phone! Meet the dogs, watch the finalists or even the entire dog show event with NBC’s free dog show app. Sorted by group, you can scroll through this year’s contestants and watch video clips, or just jump to the Best in Show competition real-time viewers can’t wait for. Since this app is free, and NBC has to get their revenue somewhere, you’ll see quite a few ads in the lower part of your screen.   Less