Clocks - and generic information panels

My phone and tablets already display date and time, calendar summary, and weather summary on their home screens.

Loads of stuff

I have on old Nexus7 tablet with the docking station, sits on the side in the kitchen, as it's permanently powered it goes into "daydream mode" rather than into standby, which displays a big clock. Main use is to stream internet radio to a bluetooth speaker within the same room.

Unfortunately most apps such as BBC News, or BBC Weather have got too bloated for it to run without crawling on its knees ... so I don't use it for much more that a glorified clock/radio these days, e.g. it's quicker to walk to the lounge and change the heatmiser thermostat than wait for the app to launch ...

A slightly non-obvious search term is smart mirror, eg

Presumably you don't have to use the 'mirror' part if you don't want to

Owain

Cool - that's exactly what I'm thinking of - thanks. Bookmarked that.

Cool - I love the mirror one. Cheers again!

Yeah - this would need a custom app - possibly just one that displays nothing but HTML/CSS or SVG/CSS from a web server - and we do the information distillation and reformatting on the server where it's easier (compared to writing a super involved app)

For a bit of nostalgia to go with your clock, try this:

Or, if that's not suffiently nostagic for you, you can always go mechanical:

or you can run the windows 2.0 clock.

NT

Pre-Android, but there was:

I bought a Joggler in the clearance sale. Their stock OS was pretty limited, but it's an x86 PC inside. Thanks to some hackers on the forum it runs Android OK-ish, but it has a habit of crashing and corrupting its USB stick (which holds the OS) and then refusing to boot. There's also some hardware limitations (small screen, no battery, no microphone, the stand is used as the CPU heatsink so it's unremovable)

The other thing about using something like this as a clock is that often the brightness doesn't go low enough. If it's night time, you might not want the room to be floodlit by the clock; even if it's on the lowest brightness setting displays can still be quite bright.

Plus expect to burn some power on running it 24/7 (although a tablet takes a lot less than the joggler with its netbook-class CPU).

Theo