Ever since the IPhone emerged and HTC started making beautiful widgets for the weather apps, people started wanting these things. Weather applications are today quite important and appear often in the Best Selling Applications Top 10 . They became more and more complex and the clients are always asking for more.

I used Weather Eye V. 1 for a few months with my last Bold, the 9000. It was OK, but only that. Because the design was quite blunt, most of the forecasts were not working and the other features were useless for me. They still are in whatever weather application I might use. I am the kind of customer I use the weather application to see what’s outside in the morning and how’s gonna be the weather in the next 2 days. I can always check-back tomorrow for the next days’ forecast.

It seems like the guys at Bellshare knew better and developed a wicked weather application for Blackberry. It’s called BerryWeather and it’s number 1 in sales on almost all the specialized websites.  Currently, they’re having an open Beta for the 2.1 version and people are flocking to try this one out. Unfortunately, the Beta lasts for 3 days only and this is a drawback; sometimes you need a bit more time to figure out what are features are important and which ones will you use. Except for that, the 2.0 brings a lot of features (as they appear on Bellshare’ site):

Features

  • NO SUBSCRIPTION!
  • Current conditions including “Feels like” temperature, wind, pressure, dew point, humidity.
  • 7-day forecast with high/low temperature and precipitation probability
  • 24-hour forecast with temperature, precipitation probability, wind and humidity
  • Easily switch between 7 different views (Today, Today with Daily Forecast, Today with Hourly Forecast, Full Daily Forecast, Full Hourly Forecast, Compact Daily Forecast, Compact Hourly Forecast)
  • ANIMATED RADAR MAPS (for US Locations only, add custom radar maps and webcams for any location)
  • Track your location via GPS/CELL TOWER LOCATION so you always know the weather where you are. (Cell location for GSM devices only. GPS does not work for non-Storm devices on Verizon due to carrier restrictions)
  • Sunrise/Sunset times and moon phase
  • Weather advisory notifications
  • Customizable homescreen icon showing current conditions
  • Customizable homescreen wallpaper showing current conditions (OS 4.7 and higher)
  • Support for different themes (Widgets, Simple and Simple Dark)
  • Customizable background wallpaper
  • Customizable font size
  • Customizable icon size
  • Multiple icon set

New in Version 2.0!

  • Weather Data:
    - New weather source: WeatherUnderground
    - Get more accurate current conditions by switching to a nearby weather stations for any location
  • Visual:
    - New high resolution iconset
    - See your current weather as a homescreen wallpaper, includes many customization options (OS 4.7 and higher)
    - Full support for OS 5.0 screen transitions
  • Weather Advisories:
    - Get notifications only for specific advisories
    - Support for BerryPopup, get a popup with advisory details in any app
  • Radar Maps/Webcams
    - Now you can use multiple custom radar maps/webcams
    - Pinch-to-zoom radar maps on any touchscreen BlackBerry

And the new Beta:

New Features/Bug Fixes in 2.1
- Complete rework of the core. BerryWeather will now fully close the UI when sent to background. The homescreen wallpaper and icon will keep updating. Unloading the UI should save a lot of memory and avoid many potential memory leaks.
- Major rework of internal data storage. Only basic location data will be persisted across reboots. Other data is automatically reloaded approx 60s after reboot or when BerryWeather UI is opened
- Using new server protocol to improve update speeds and minimize CPU load
- Changed forecast/advisory update settings. New option ‘With Forecast’ for advisory will update advisories whenever forecasts are updated, ‘Never’ will never update advisories
- Added data+settings backup to memory card
- Added support for setting the icon size on homescreen wallpaper
- Added support for blacking out the settings screen (on by default)
- Added support for selecting whether to show radar/webcam links in internal viewer or browser (allows adding mp3/video/html links)
- Fixed lag on image browser for background image selection
- Fixed lag issues on BlackBerry Tour (and other devices)
- Fixed several potential memory leaks
- Fixed errors on first time built-in map loading

Impressive? From a tech point of view, yes. From (my) consumer point of view, no. But I am not your average weather-application client.  People use most of these features. See the link for the open Beta, they really do chip in on customer experience and feature usability!

The main impact, the make/break point (or one of the most important!) comes from the price: 9.95$. In a world in which applications usually cost 3$, the BlackBerry users have to break the piggy-bank in order to have the same quality applications. I intentionally leave all the features and fixes above, so one can see why this application costs almost 10$ . In the end it’s up on the consumer to pay or not. Because if the consumer doesn’t pay, there’s a free version also called BeWeather.

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It offers a glimpse of what BerryWeather is like, and I have to say it’s really, really great that they are able to offer basic functionality for free. Yes, you can’t update you weather every 15 minutes (it’ll drain your battery and eat a portion of your plan), you can’t get typhoon alarms (who needs it?) and you can’t have the weather of more than 3 cities at the same time (yeah, right, like I can’t switch it to another location when I get there!). But it works! And it works great! Nice, high resolution icon on the home-screen, highly customizable (yes, even in the free version!) and especially important it is very accurate! Even in Romania which is not very well represented in weather applications, like you’ll see in the next one. There is no lag, no failed updates and home-screen-icon updates as it should (so it WAS an OS 5.0 bug!).

I always like competition. WeatherEye V.2 has just finished Beta and the final version just became available. It’s a big improvement over the first version like:

  • New WeatherEye design
  • Wi-Fi Connectivity
  • Ability to add multiple cities
  • Radar maps
  • Hourly forecast
  • GPS locator

The TWN team  set up a thread on Crackberry on December 14th, 2009, which I reckon it helped a lot because on Jan 25th, 2010 they had the final build. Pretty quick since Crackberry is the most popular forum for BlackBerry users across the globe.

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The V2 version is pretty close to V1. They say they changed the design. They did regarding the images themselves but the structure remains just the same. The menu has some add-ons la GPS, the Bing (radar) map and the hourly forecast – I’m not sure but I guess in the first version you could be able to update it a max 4 times/day. But looking above I took two screenshots regarding the forecast: no forecast for my region. I don’t know if this happens only to me or if it happens to many other people but the only one working were “current conditions” and “long term forecast”, which means a few days. Other options are sending the weather on email for a friend, watching the map in your region and that’s about it. The design is more rigid and less appealing when compared to Beweather, which is the scaled-down version of a full-fledged weather application. The differences between them? WeatherEye is free. Less accurate, less customizable but doing its job nevertheless.

In the end, it all comes down to user choice: you need a powerful weather application, you are into animated weather widgets that can be set as wallpapers and you are ready to pay, BerryWeather is for you. You are a basic weather conditions seeker you have too free choices: WeatherBug or BeWeather. I went to BeWeather because of the accuracy and much nicer design. But there’s a catch: in order to “convince” you to buy the full program, you need to “activate” the application almost daily. Let me explain: you see the home-screen icon updated, it tell you some info like temperature, hi/low conditions, etc and then you want some extra info like forecast. When you press “W”, which is the keyboard shortcut for BeWeather you get a menu asking you to either continue with the free version or upgrade. And for some 10$ is the price to get-away from this daily chore.

Update Feb, 18th: Because there is a new update on WeatherEye V.2.0.1.4, the old link (in the upper part of the article) was disabled, this is the new link for the new version!