Review: WeatherBug
Score:
80%
WeatherBug is a big name in weather - just look at their apps for every other platform and browser known to man. And now it's on Symbian too, courtesy of the ease of app development that is Qt. For all Symbian^3 phones (and a few S60 5th Edition ones which you've been brave enough to install Qt onto), WeatherBug is a fairly comprehensive solution, whatever your forecasting and meteorological needs - and it's totally free, which always helps!
Version Reviewed: 1.0.9
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The number of weather forecasting solutions for every mobile platform continues to grow and grow, but I for one am not complaining because this one is not only free of charge (thanks to the mobile ad panel in each view) but just about the best available. All that's missing is a Symbian^3 homescreen widget - and I'm guessing that'll happen in time.
In the meantime, we've got support for multiple cities, reports and alerts, forecasts, aerial and satellite maps and even, in some regions of the world, webcams, so you can see for yourself what the weather is doing.
The default view is a split screen affair, with current conditions at your chosen city, right up to 'feels like' temperature (i.e. incorporating any wind chill), plus a selected satellite view, in this case showing 'Infrared satellite', good for showing up cloud masses and giving you a feel for where your country sits amidst the continental weather system:
The screenshots here are all in landscape format purely to help the content in this review - WeatherBug works just as well in portrait modem stacking the split view components on 'top' of each other.
Tapping on the 'left' panel here brings up (depending on exactly where you tap) either weather alerts or (as shown below) alternative 'current' information, including humidity, pressure, plus sunrise and sunset times:
Similarly, tapping on the right pane gives extra options, in this case related to the 'map' display. Here's the 'Pressure' variant, mapping how atmospheric pressure varies over your chosen map zoom level. You can zoom in quite a long way, though of course you then see less in terms of the weather that's 'coming up'. In the screenshot, notice also the 'play' icon - some views have enough data (time-wise) that an animation over the course of a day, played hour by hour, is possible.
The right hand side icons let you change the map mode to a different satellite and to switch the base map from 'roads' to 'aerial photo'. It's a flexible system and pretty well implemented.
But what of forecasting? What's the weather going to do tomorrow? In three days time? Notice that there were three icons beneath the map display in the first couple of screenshots. The second one switches the right pane into a 'forecast' mode, showing the next four days' weather at a glance:
And (you won't be surprised to learn) you can tap this too, to bring up more detailed textual versions, for each day and its corresponding night-time:
The final module in WeatherBug is for webcams, initiated with the third right hand pane icon. It's a neat idea, in that you can see a recently snapped photo of the appropriate city, but I tried a number of cities around the world and was greeted by 'No camera data'. I get the feeling that this feature is very USA-centric and also rather experimental. I managed a snap of New York, mind you:
Hopefully the range of city webcams can be increased significantly in the near future - I know there are hundreds of thousands of possible sources around the world, they just need WeatherBug to tap into them.
In a crowded utility niche, WeatherBug does enough to be worth noticing and installing - in fact, it just became my weather forecaster of choice for my Symbian^3 phones. The only disclaimer I'd add would be that I only tracked the weather it predicted for a couple of days, it remains to be seen how accurate the WeatherBug forecasts are for non-USA regions - but then as it's free there's no reason why you can't grab it as well and leave your own data points and comments!
Steve Litchfield, All About Symbian, 13 April 2011
Reviewed by Steve Litchfield at