Liven up your Lumia lock screen

Check out these tips on how to customize the lock screen on your Lumia phone to make it more useful and interesting.

It’s pretty easy to personalize your lock screen with photos or updated information from your favorite app (go here to find out how), but you’ll need an app to perform a more radical makeover.

Here are our picks for making your Lumia’s lock screen more useful and fun!

City Art Search (free)

Update your lock screen with beautiful new artwork every day using Microsoft’s City Art Search app. It can cycle through random or favorite artworks from a collection of 3,700 famous pieces, or you can search by art, artist, city, gallery, artistic movement, and century to find a masterpiece well-suited for your Lumia.

Lockie (free)

Add weather, calendar, famous quotes, RSS feeds, and more to your lock screen with the Lockie app. It can also be used to randomly shuffle through background photos.

Map Wallpaper (free)

Winner of the San Diego DVLUP Hackathon 2013, Map Wallpaper gives you a current map of your location, automatically updated every half hour. Choose from several types of maps, including USGS Topographic, Bing Maps Aerial and Streets, and NEXRAD U.S. Rain Radar.

Battery+ (free)

In addition to providing comprehensive battery settings and statistics (including battery-level history and number of charge cycles on your Lumia), the Battery+ app allows you to see your remaining charge time in days, hours, and minutes on your lock screen.

[+]Lockscreen (free)

Experience a beautiful new wallpaper on your lock screen every day along with highlighted events from your calendar. [+]Lockscreen supplies thousands of photos perfectly formatted for your Lumia phone.

Lockmix (free)

This handy app turns your lock screen into a grid where you can pin multiple tiles, which are updated regularly with content from the in-app widgets you select.

Choose from practical stuff such as medical information, emergency contacts, news, maps, and stock updates to fun things such as daily horoscopes, daily quotes, and facts about actor Chuck Norris. (Some widgets require an in-app purchase.)

What’s on your lock screen? Tell or show us in the comments below!