Quick Look… PocketWeather 2.08
Posted by: Peter Murphy on Jun 29 2008 
When I reviewed PocketWeather 2.0 back in January, I was a little overwhelmed at the intricacy of the program, and actually the level at which it went into the weather.
Come to think of it most of us probably buy a program like this for the today screen plugin, to have relevant weather information at our fingertips on device startup. A reminder to bring your brolly or to rug up.
The program change log points to some stuff, but if your not very technical it wont mean much. If you are running a business as a rainmaker or weather diviner as a scam, PocketWeather would be invaluable.
Let’s have a look at some of the changes
One of the big improvements was the addition of weather alerts. Now finding an area of the world facing some severe weather problems, so as to visually document the process of recieving an alert, I thought would be difficult. Lo and behold, my home town Melbourne, known for being able to produce four seasons in one day, delivered.
Alerts come as the program updates and can be configured to appear as a windows notification.
Again behind the program is a massively configurable set of options, that are overwhelming, but with attention to detail Pocket Weather is a really useful weather tool. One of the problems I found earlier was the amount of data the automatic update feature ate up. If you don’t have an unlimited data plan you really need to watch the settings for updating. SBSH have kindly added a number of options to let you manipulate your update experience. If I said to you I re installed Pocket Weather one day ago to do this quick look, would you be surprised to hear that in that time the downloads, which do not include any cellular data downloads, already add up to
a little over 3 Mb. Obviously you wouldn’t want to install this to your device, but timing on updating is highly customisable.
I think the improvements since I last looked at Pocket Weather are intelligent and well thought out, this is a hardcore meteorological tool, not just a today plug in. It’s huge though and probably not for everyone, running the today screen plugin eats over 4 Mb of memory, and the size of the program file on the device is 5.8. almost 6 Mb. I find the program fascinating, but it’s probably surplus to most peoples needs.
If you haven’t given it a look it’s worth checking out but be prepared for a steep learning curve.
PocketWeather is Compatible with: Pocket PC 2003, Windows Mobile 5 and Windows Mobile 6 Professional/Classic operating systems.
PocketWeather 2.0 retails for US$ 14.99.
PocketWeather registered users are entitled to upgrade to the new PocketWeather 2.0 for a special price of $4.95.
You can download a trial or the full version of PocketWeather 2.0 from the JAMM Store
Or Pick it up directly from SBSH software
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I completely agree, the 1st gen had issues. I think they rushed it to...
I thought that weather looked terribly familiar! — And it was, I’m from Melbourne too.
PocketWeather is great. The by the hour-by-hour predictions are astounding. Last Thursday it said it would be cloudy until 12, and sure enough, it cleared up at 11:30. The precipitation chance always seems accurate too. Sure, it depends on how good your national weather bureau/airport meteorologists are, but Pocketweather presents it well.
I was also overwhelmed by the options, but you don’t need to mess with most of them to get it running, the defaults are quite sensible. I have updated over a gprs connection, it was quite quick, and fortunately the data use was low (about 6kb) - though that was only basic conditions/forecast info for one location.
Good writeup!
Ha, Iphitus, good to know there are some locals reading this as well. The defaults are quite sensible I agree, except for the default download options, which I disable until I want to use the program.
Welcome to JAMM, the invasion begins Eh
PocketWeather is a great app. I still pine for my old Weatherpanel ( I miss my silly animated icons and layouts.
), but PocketWeather is a great substitute. In particular I very much like the ability to have a radar image thumbnail, something SPB Weather to my knowledge hasn’t yet implemented. Also, you can get a slightly more detail version of the WeatherConsole in PocketWeather by selecting Menu–>Views–>Detailed.
I like the detail as well Bryan, radar images are one thing, if you add London as a tab and download images you actually get a stop frame CCTV capture that plays like an animation and get a real time view of, I think it’s Picadilly