BeWeather
For those who live in a kingdom of rains
Android App of the Week BlackBerry Messenger aside, there can’t be many BB apps that Android users have been waiting for. But one such is BeWeather which has just been ported across.
I’ll stick my neck out here and say that BeWeather is the most attractive and versatile weather app around. As if that’s not enough, while the full version for BlackBerry costs a staggering £9.99, the Android version will only set you back £2.19.
BeWeather packs in plenty of info
Design-wise, BeWeather is very much a Premier League app. The main display presents a comprehensive view of the relevant weather data in a clear and attractive way.
Swipe left and your other pre-set locations scroll into view. Tap the screen and a pop-up menu appears showing the daily or hourly forecast and the times of sun/moonrise and sun/moonset
View radar images (left) and the location of weather sampling stations (right)
Open up the menu and you can toggle a map showing exactly which weather station you are seeing data from. You can chose another station as the default for a give locale if the location search can’t find your preferred choice off the bat.
The background can be set to run some very appealing live weather animations which alter from day to night. Each page also shows you the local time making the app a useful world clock too.
Widgets of up to 4 x 3 are provided (left) and you can adjust the icons to your heart's content (right)
Weather data is pulled from Weather Underground and was near enough identical to the BBC’s weather information. A couple of quick Skype calls to a cousin in Houston and a mate in Bangkok revealed that BeWeather was bang on for both those locations as well as for rainy Salford.
You can also watch weather radar animations within the app, though at the moment the US is covered rather more thoroughly than is the rest of the world.
The Pro version comes with six widgets ranging from 1 x 1 to 4 x 3, all of which can be set to display different volumes of data. If you prefer to mix and match your weather and clock widgets, BeWeather supports the same icon sets as Fancy Widgets and Beautiful Widgets. ®
Size 4.6MB
App2SD No
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COMMENTS
Been using BeWeather for months.
As accurate as the HTC Sense weather widget and app.
It uses Weather Underground for it's data which like accuweather and pretty much every other weather website going uses the output data from the NCEP GFS data model which updates 4 times a day. The live "now" data comes from your nearest weather station which includes personal weather stations - so for instance in Greenlaw the app defaults to using my personal weather station since it is only a few metres away from my current location :)
As to the poster who suggested it didn't support multiple locations - it does - you simply add each location and you can access the locations via a dedicated widget for each location or by swiping left and right in the app to change to another location.
£2.19?
It's free on GetJar.com. Still don't think it supports multiple locations. The free Samsung widget that comes with the Galaxy S2 is actually pretty bloody good. At least that recognises that I need to see weather for more than one place.
Was sounding good
Sounded good until "Weather data is ... near enough identical to the BBC’s weather information"
Given that the BBC's weather forecast is complete and utter shite I won't be bothering.
I must admit, despite their being seemingly hundreds of weather apps for Android it is one area I Find disappointing. I'm a hill walker so I'm interested in detailed, accurate weather information but find it very hard to find. Accuweather is brilliant on the web but their Android client is woeful. The best I've found so far is Wetter.com but some of the interface is in English and some in German.
One test I have is looking up the weather for home and work. There is a bloody great range of hills and mountains in between so the weather is usually different in one place to the other - even though there is just 11 miles between them. The BBC always has them as having the same weather.
BBC weather
Is very much a curate's egg - possibly because they tend to aggregate large areas and take little account of local oddities. Wunderground tends to be more accurate - certainly for Edinburgh.
