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Category: Weather utility
Developer: AccuWeather
File Size 2.0MB
Version Reviewed: 1.0
Requirements: iPhone 2.0 Software
Compatibility: iPhone and iPod Touch
Price: Free

Up until this point, I have been using WeatherBug as my main iPhone application when it came to getting the weather around my local area. It was free and it worked pretty well, but it was missing a few features that would have been really nice to have. Then, AccuWeather came out in the iTunes App Store. This application not only addresses some of the issues of WeatherBug, it offers more information as well. If you haven’t noticed, I’ve quickly started to like this application quite a lot.

To begin, this application has the popular AccuWeather.com website giving it the data that it uses, so you know the results are going to be accurate. However, the best feature of this application is the GPS support. Unlike WeatherBug, AccuWeather uses the iPhone’s built in GPS to find your current location and give you the most accurate results for where you are. On top of giving you the temperature, humidity, pressue, and wind information on the main page, it also displays a nice image based on the weather. The weather can be seen in the following modes: current, hourly, 5 day, and indices. However, the best part about this page is the RealFeel feature, which, as you can guess, gives you the temperature in what it actually feels like, not what the thermometers say.

This application also offers a radar to view the weather from above. However, this is one of my complaints. After using WeatherBug, I miss its radar because it was a lot better than the one offered by AccuWeather, which is not nearly as informative. That said, I’m glad they included some sort of implementation of it. Other than that, the only complaint I have about this application is that it has ads on most of its pages, which can be sort of annoying sometimes.

Like WeatherBug, this application also allows you to view newscasts in either high or low resolution, and in a few different styles, such as lifestyle and fun. On top of the previously mentioned pages, there is also a risks page. This page uses sliders to tell you the risk of receiving either thunderstorms, rain, snow, ice, wind, or fog in the next eight hours. The final two pages are alarms and alerts. Alerts is pretty self explanatory, but the alarms page isn’t so much. That page simply tells you how much accumulation you are going to receive (i.e. inches of snow) through the week.

For now, I still have both WeatherBug and AccuWeather on my iPhone to do a little more testing. However, I think AccuWeather will replace it with a little more time. It is developed by a well reputed weather company and has many features that I like about it, especially the RealFeel. Keep in mind that this is the very first version of the application, and I’m sure that it will definitely get better with a little more time.