4 Android apps worth buying

I'm cheap. I hate to pay for software, especially mobile software. It may not work on my device (Droid 2). It may not perform as advertised. It may not do what I thought it would do, and you can't return it.

So I rarely buy apps for my cell phone.

But there have been a few I've actually paid for and found worth the money.

Tower Raiders Gold ($3.99): Played both v1.0 and v2.0 free versions before buying the the first version. It's a tower defense game. You must strategically place tower weaponry to stop the Raiders from stealing your crystals. It can be a bit repetitious, but I enjoy figuring out not only which weapons to use, but how to place them to route the Raiders through the most defensible path.

Flex T9 Keyboard ($4.99): The FlexT9 keyboard is the best Android keyboard I've found, with the right balance between key size for my fat thumbs and total keyboard size. It also uses Dragon Naturally Speaking technology for its speech recognition software.

Beautiful Widgets ($2.82): Includes a number of widgets for putting clocks and weather info on your screen. I got it specifically for the Beautiful Weather Live Wallpaper, which shows my city's actual weather as my wallpaper. Very geeky.

X Construction ($1.42): My favorite physics game. Use the limited resources to build a bridge across various landscapes so the train can safely cross. It's harder than it looks.