It's always good to see competition in the application sphere, even among free solutions. Having been treated to Nokia's own Weather application and widget last month, we now have the Qt-based Gismeteo, hailing from Russia but seemingly providing a fast interface and accurate weather forecasting. Screenshots, notes and link below.

Finding Gismeteo in the Nokia Store and installing it - note the Qt pop-up dialog. The application starts in around four seconds - I do wish the guys behind the Qt runtime would speed up this aspect of modern applications.

Your location is found using normal Symbian positioning and the forecast grabbed from Gismeteo's servers. Just as with Nokia Weather, there's the choice of hourly or daily breakdowns. Plus a handy choice of units for humidity and wind speed.

Impressively, you can not only add extra cities but also see their current weather status on the setup screen. Ooh, Reading, UK is eight degrees hotter than San Francisco right now... [ok, so the sun's just rising there - still, Gismeteo says that the hottest there is only going to be 15 degrees C today - Reading FTW!!] Also, note that the forecast is a full seven day one.

There's also a very basic widget, with just an icon for the current weather, the current temperature and the current outlook for your current selected city in the main application. I'd hope that the Gismeteo folks develop a proper forecast widget as well, this would round out an excellent app.

You can grab Gismeteo for free on the Nokia Store, it's compatible with all Qt-compatible Symbian smartphones, I think. Comments welcome!