A new year means out with the old and in with the new. In the ole days that might have mostly meant cleaning our houses, but in today's modern lifestyle it can also mean something else: time to choose new apps!

As we begin 2015, here are eight must-have apps that could make your next year a little better.

Timely Alarm Clock
On cold winter days, who really wants to get out of their warm, comfy bed? Make this experience as painless as possible with Timely Alarm Clock. It’s easy to use, gorgeous to look at, and works just as well on tablets as it does on your smartphone. It even turns down the alarm volume when you pick up the device.

Elevate
We spend so much time and energy hitting the gym. Why not give your brain some love, too? Elevate is a mental workout for your brain. Through more than 25 games and personalized training exercises, you can teach yourself to focus better, process information more quickly, write and speak more effectively, improve your memory, and more. You can even track your progress and see yourself get smarter.

Feedly
Stay up to date on reading all your favorite blogs and websites with Feedly. This RSS client is robust, easy to use, and includes other plug-ins to work with services like Evernote. It also makes it a cinch to connect to your social networks so can easily connect to whatever it is you’re reading. You might even use it to discover a few new feeds to follow in the new year.

QuickPic
If you have thousands of photos spread out across various online accounts, QuickPic is your jam. It can pull photos from Picasa, Google Drive, Dropbox, Flickr, and more, so you have access to all of your photos in one central location. And, you know, if some of those photos are of a more, shall we say, incriminating than others, rest assured it’s easy to password protect them.

LastPass
Believe it or not, there are still a lot people out there who still use the password, “PASSWORD.” Don't be ashamed. That’s why LastPass exists. It’s a password management app that lets you store all of your passwords in one place, so you can use a different (and preferably stronger) password for every site without having to remember them all. And if you’re worried about keeping all of your passwords in one place, you can add multifactor authentication to ensure your passwords remain hidden and secure.

Cerberus
While you are an upstanding and model citizen, there are others who may not share your same sense of decency. Which is to say that there may come a time when you find that your mobile device has been stolen. Should that happen, Cerberus can help protect your phone. When stolen, you retain remote control of the device, allowing you to track it, wipe the memory, lock the device, and record audio. And when you get near the stolen device, you can narrow down its location (and really annoy the thief) by turning on a loud alarm on the phone—even if the device is in silent mode.

Slack
Anyone who has ever worked on a group project in school knows collaboration is hard. While Slack isn’t going to prevent someone from trying to let everybody else do the work for them, it does make it easy to communicate and collaborate with your team members, no matter where you are, by creating a central hub for messages and important files. Plus, you can break things down by workflow, so nobody is getting spammed with messages unrelated to their work.

Pushbullet
Keeping with the theme of collaboration, Pushbullet is designed to make all of your devices communicate seamlessly. With Pushbullet installed on all of your devices, you’ll be able to push data from one device to another immediately. This makes it easy to send your phone an article for you to read later, send your desktop a picture for immediate editing, or even read your text messages on your computer when you’re too lazy to get up and check your phone.

Tell us, which apps would be on your nice list? Let us know on our Facebook, Google+, or on Twitter using the hashtag #MotoAppyNewYear.

Posted by the Motorola Blog Team