One of my obsessions is knowing the weather. I use a variety of means for finding out the current weather conditions, both for where I am at, and places where friends and family live. Every morning at 8 AM I get a text message with a brief weather report. On my computer’s running Windows Vista I have the weather sidebar gadget. I wear a geek watch connected to MSN Direct, which is a dieing service, in large part to get weather updates along with stock, news, and sports updates.
No surprise, then, that amongst the first applications that I have installed on my T-Mobile G1 phone are weather applications. I’ve tried the Accuweather, Weather Channel, and WeatherBug applications and for me the best one is the Weather Channel application.
The WeatherBug application is a disappointment because I’ve always liked the Windows versions of their app, but the Android version doesn’t display the live temperature and wind meter and the video is disappointing both in it’s quality and content. The Weather Bug video shows weather across the nation, which is interesting, but not when I want to see my local forecast. The one thing that is really cool with the Android WeatherBug application is that it has a feature for sending the screen shots to other people via e-mail or MMS. For example, here is a shot of the weather radar at my house a few days ago when it was raining, which I sent to my Twitter stream.
I like the Weather Channel application because the video displays as if I am watching it on TV and they provide a local forecast that is updated throughout the day. So, when I check the video in the morning, it tells me what the weather is expected to me like that afternoon. When I check back in the afternoon I will see that evening’s forcast along with next morning’s. Weather Channel does a nice job of caching so that the video displays smoothly even when only connected to the Internet via Edge
All of the Weather apps on Android take advantage of the ability to automatically determine the current location and provide the weather information for that location. To it’s credit, Weather Bug automatically determines the current location when the application starts, while I have to force the Weather Channel application to determine my current location. Both properly determine the correct location utilizing the cell tower information. I have not yet used the built-in GPS because I am usually indoors when I use these applications.
Neither of the applications appear to provide automatic weather alerts the way that I would like, probably because the applications are not constantly running. What I want is my phone to fire an audible notification when there is a severe weather alert for my location. Recently there was a weather alert in my area, and the Weather Channel app indicated the alert once I started it, while the Weather Bug app didn’t know anything about the alert. Neither app automatically notified me of the weather alert.
The technology is available with the G1 to always know my location and to be able to check for weather alerts on the Internet. I am aware, however, that there is a price to pay for this capability in the form of battery life because the phone would be more frequently communicating to servers on the Internet. For now I am willing to sacrifice that battery life while I am hopeful that Google will make improvements to Android that will increase battery life. These weather applications are one way in which I use my G1 in a different way than I ever used my Windows Mobile devices.
Notes From The Cave 