Tetra Lockscreen for Windows Phone 8.1

Windows Phone users who are upset about Microsoft’s Next Lock Screen for Android may want to check out a similar effort for their favorite platform. Microsoft’s Tetra Lockscreen provides similar functionality, offering a variety of lock screen widgets and some nice customization capabilities.

You can find out more about Microsoft’s Next Lock Screen in Microsoft + Android: Next Lock Screen. Like that effort, Tetra Lockscreen—which requires Windows Phone 8.1—is a Microsoft Garage effort, so it has updated fairly frequently since its original October 2014 release. Indeed it was just updated.

Put simply, Tetra Lockscreen is a live lock screen that lets you add a number of useful and interactive widgets to your lock screen, turning the screen from a passive experience to an active one. Available widgets include:

Weather. This widget displays the local weather information based on the location of the phone, or the weather for a particular location. You get a three day forecast, and can access the MSN Weather app with one tap.

Agenda. See your upcoming calendar events, choosing which phone-based calendars to use. The UI is nice, too, with a simple timeline that splits the day into segments.

Current location. See your current location on a street map that includes nearby calendar events with identifiable locations. And you can even pan and zoom in the map.

Activity tracker. This one requires a Lumia device with Sensor Core hardware, but if you are so outfitted, it will display your activity (in steps, distance or calories burned), and let you compare by hour in the daily view, or by day in the weekly view.

Stopwatch. Amazingly enough, Windows Phone still doesn’t come with a stopwatch. So this wizard fills the gap, helping you keep time even when your screen is off.

You can configure the lock screen widgets using a simple settings app.

This one looks pretty great. You can download the free Tetra Lockscreen for Windows Phone 8.1 from the Windows Phone Store.