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Mobile gadgets running Blackberry & Android OS'
BeWeather versus WeatherEye V. 2 Beta
2741 days
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.
. .
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!
Preparing a Blackberry apps Versus bewteen WeatherEye Beta and BeWeather
0745 days
A lot of controversy is surrounding the best sold weather application for Blackberry: Berry Weather. Bellshare had to offer a free version, too, called BeWeather in order to both promote and gain some market share from the competition. The “only” problem? A LOT of customers are complaining about bugs. Then why is this the best sold application? Hopefully we’ll see.
BlackBerry Bold 9700 – first impressions
0746 days
Just got a Bold 9700 in order to replace my first Bold, the 9000, which underwent 3 serviceinterventions in the last 3 months in order to clean the trackball. Each and every time the service offered to replace my 1. 3 years old Bold with a brand new one. When I asked why, they said RIM forbids them to fix anything hardware on the Bold, they are required to exchange them with a brand new one in case of warranty, of course.
Because I had (have) more than 35 paid apps on it (oh, maybe 20% of them were won by commenting on different forums and blog-posts!), I refused to allow them to exchange it and insisted on the cleaning every time. By the way, the BlackBerry developers use the PIN excuse to double-charge the customer: if I like to change my phone every 3 months and I need MY application, paid by ME, why would you, the developer refuse to do so? Am I paying an annual subscription to your application? Funny, it’s not mentioned anywhere! Anyhow, that’s another issue; Mobihand changed my PIN and allowed me to install them all, no problem, by the way, great service! But then, at some point, the screen started to act-up. I thought it was the OS and I was planning to do an update anyway; I did it, went to .304 but the problems got worse: the screen would go all white or depending on I-don’t-know-why, would go to transform itself in thousands and thousands of tiny pixels of all colors! Other times, I’d find all kinds of artifacts on the screen, all kinds of shapes and sizes. I looked it up and surely, it’s a common fault with the screen – it tends to die at some point. So I went to 9700.
To cut to the chase: I just have it since Saturday but in all this time I never let it out of my hands. So far, so good (some of the first impressions are compared to my last Bold, the 9000):
PROs:
- smaller form-factor, as asked by the large portion of non-Blackberry users.
- better screen, higher resolution : 480 x 360, 2.44 inches vs 480 x 320 on the old Bold, 2.75 inches.
- feeling very solid overall, better materials, better built – no squeaking of the back cover and no dodgy back cover lock.
- the optical pad – wins against the trackball hands-down
- OS 5.0 is a bit better, faster and packs some extras like HTML emails (which I still fail to see; the 9000 also has HTML but I didn’t see any HTML email, so I guess it’s my lack of BES?!) and vibe&ring at the same time, more options when customizing the calls, signals, etc.
- all my 4.6 apps are working on 5.0 without a whim.
- more ROM (256 MB) at the same RAM 128 MB but this makes it snappier and quite stabil : no resets or slowdowns.
- decent camera, 3.2 MP with AF vs 2 MB without AF in the Bold 9000.
- battery life seems almost double vs the Bold 9000 in my own experience.
- micro-SD of 2 GB included in the original package
- the pouch is awesome to use unlike the old one; I never used it because at some point I had troubles removing it, in order to reply to phone calls!
CONs:
- due to smaller size, the keypad seems a bit crammed and I’m sure my learning curve will span much longer than the one day needed with the original Bold
- not so much improvement in OS 5.0 – I’d like to see a bit of a difference in U.I but I guess Java doesn’t allow them to play too much with the U.I
- the only real customization of the screen comes only from a theme, which means you’re depending on developers’ creativity
- only 256 MB of internal capacity vs 1 GB on the Bold 9000 – nobody was using that anyway because they were too afraid it will slow down the phone (which never happened, by the way!)
- linked to the CON above, when transferring data from the 9000 to the 9700 by the means of the (in)famous Desktop Manager, you’ll run into trouble because 256 MB aren’t enough; I deleted everything big I could think of and still got an “not enough space” error
- the change of the connection/charging port from MiniUSB, which is highly common to the new, all-manufacturers-will-use-it MicroUSB means I need to change all my accessories and that means extra cash spent.
That’s it for now, more in the following weeks. I can’t really put my finger on this, but I have a good feeling this phone will sell very, very well.
The new BlackBerry Bold 9700 – a worthy “bold” replacement?
2750 days
As mentioned last night, I was lucky enough to get my hands on one of the few, first-batch Blackberrys Bold 9700 to arrive at Vodafone Romania. The timing is completely wrong, as I was in the middle of testing the leaky 4.7 OS…or might be one of the applications I am running constantly; I wasn’t able to find out for certain because my 1.5 years old Bold 9000 started acting up – the screen is slowly dying.
So I had to start reinstalling all the free applications I could find: Weather Bug as I know it is no longer free, the App World has now two modules and I had to use a hack to install it, so I can use it in my country (not available officially), the L 10 icons theme with the Today plug-in is not available for 9700, as well as quite a few other programs. I also lost a few applications I won in the last year for my first generation Bold, applications I have to pay to replace. I also had some nice surprises: Seesmic for Blackberry ( a heads-up already, as I used this application for Android already) and a newer, better weather app, namely BeWeather Free (great visuals!!)
Overall, I think it’s a win-win situation: more RAM, a smaller form factor, a better screen, the optical track-pad, the 3.2 MP auto-focus camera and a better build quality. On OS side, the new 5.0 version brings HTML to email messages and improvements on “signaling” side; no need for BerryBuzz anymore for example.
Looking forward to see how it works in the future and I hope to be able to conduct a series of tests in order to find out if some of the apps leak or if the 5.0 is the future. Other than those, this is evolution.
Why is my BlackBerry leaking memory? – take 2
0751 days
This was supposed to be another part of the many tests in order to see what’s leaking on my BlackBerry Bold. I did it but for a shorter period of time than planned because I’m switching over to BlackBerry Bold 9700 a.k.a the Bold 2. Up until now there was no indication that any of the “always-running” applications are leaking, but I’ll never truly know as I stop testing. I am pleased to know that SocialScope and DexRex are not leaking (no impact on RAM while I stopped using them) because I plan to install them on my new 9700.
So this is waht I found out from “take 2″:
Day 1
07.30: 31.28 MB at start-up. Social Scope closed down, iCallManager Light (call filter), Mobile Data Alerter, Dexrex SMS Back-up deleted (that’s why I get the extra space when compared to the 1st test. UberTwitter is not always online, just when I use it and then shut it down. PodTrapper is auto-starting in order to retrieve the latest podcast.
09.24: 24.61 MB – PodTrapper.
13.52: 20.17 MB -UT on. Later on, Yahoo Messenger and Amaze GPS.
Day 2
09.10: 14.82 MB.
17.57: 11.45 MB – UT, PodTrapper running.
Day 3
22.30: 3.22 MB
63 hrs and 21 minutes of running time. Reboot. Had to reboot because the Auto Stand-By is not working anymore…again. It seems that it needs more than 3.22 MB to be able to function.
From what I gathered up until now, the leaking is definitely coming from the OS. Java is old and slow. Hopefully more RAM will make a difference because the 9700 is going to the get the same testing treatment when I finish loading up the 3-rd party software.
Let’s see what’s changed in version 5.0!
Why is my BlackBerry leaking memory?
1759 days
I start this experiment to find out what leaks my Blackberry Bold’s memory. Except for the ones mentioned below, I run SocialScope all day long. So, is it the OS itself or one of the apps I run 24/7?
It will take more than one experiment (I need to run this every time I take out one of the apps from the list, and that will take at least 2-3 days every time.
This is purely a fun undertaking, at this time the Blackberry leaks are already legendary. They’ve tried their best at holding them at bay, even made a tool available to developers in order to improve Blackberry applications performances: the developers probably don’t use it or Quality Control is not all that important once you sell the app.
Day 1 :
29.01 MB at start-up. Social Scope closed down, iCallManager Light (call filter), Mobile Data Alerter, Dexrex SMS Back-up. UberTwitter not always online, just when I use it and then shut it down.
12.13: 21.77 MB Some SMS’ sent and a couple of emails. And of course, Doc2Go to help me write this down.
20.00: 17.86 MB No usage whatsoever, except for a few calls.
22.53: 17.38 MB SMS usage.
00.53: 19.10 MB UT on.
Day 2:
10.20: 14.88 MB No usage.
10.40: 17.24 MB UT and PodTrapper used.
19.20: 11.62 MB Yahoo Messenger and PodTrapper.
Day 3:
01.50: 9 MB PodTrapper, some games and UT from time to time.
09.05 – 9 MB – Emails.
22.00 – 2.40 MB – Emails
Day 4 :
09.26 – 3.13 MB – PodTrapper
17.00 – 2.8 MB – Email and UT usage (not on all the time).
Stand-by: 78 hours and I have to reboot because it won’t go to stand-by anymore (I use Auto-Stand-By). I have to say I am impressed with the OS stability. Other than the stand-by issue (I could always lock the keyboard which I never do) the phone doesn’t lag,responds quickly to commands, everything works as it should be, as it runs at boot-time with 29 MB of RAM.
As I write this post, I can’t help but noticing how much the OS was improved; I currently run .304 and I started with .147 when I bought the Bold. Since then, the OS had at least 10 revisions (I upgraded only 3 times) and it shows in stability,smoothness and overall improved performance. I still use Quick Pull Lite daily just to make sure I won’t have a problem, but only because it’s automatic and carries the task before I wake up, so no waiting around for me.
As for the leaking, it lasted more than expected, so for now I am not sure this is the way the OS is behaving. I’ll see in the next week or so.
