The other day the official Accuweather.com app was released over at the Windows Phone Marketplace. We briefly touched on it in the announcement post and now that we've had some time to tinker with the latest weather app, we'll take a closer look at things.
Accuweather for Windows Phone provides you with:
- Ccurrent weather conditions
- A ten day forecast
- Hourly forecasts
- Weather maps (Bing maps with animated radar and satellite views)
- Lifestyle forecasts, and video clips from Accuweather.com
You can preset up to seven locations in addition to your current location. Changing locations is simple in that all you need to do is tap on the temperature banner at the top of the screen and your listed locations appear. If you need to pull up weather information for your current location just tap the cross-hair emblem on the current conditions screen. Accuweather will then use your Windows Phone's location services to identify your location.
Accuweather for Windows Phone has live tile support that will display your location, current temperature and any weather alerts. The live tile updated immediately when running on my HD7S but has yet to update on my Samsung Focus. Settings are limited to turning on/off your live tile and location services as well as choosing Imperial or Metric readings.
There are a couple of stand out features to Accuweather. RealFeel Temperature takes into account various weather conditions to reflect what the outside temperature feels like. Accuweather also has a red exclamation mark that appears on the Current Conditions page and Live Tile to alert you of any weather alerts for your area. Just tap on the red square and the app will pull up the details on the alert. Lastly, Accuweather has a Lifestyles section that will give you a summary of how the weather matches up with a wide variety of outdoor activities and conditions.
For the most part, Accuweather is an impressive weather app for your Windows Phone. I would have liked a few choices for the app's background to give Accuweather a little more color. The app ran stable but at times, it was a little laggy. For example, I could tap the Lifestyles or Locations buttons several times before the page would load.
So, how does Accuweather compare to other weather apps for your Windows Phone? I'm not ready to give it the edge over the Weather Channel and it may be a notch better than the Weatherbug app. I guess we'll need to do a round up eventually comparing the available Windows Phone weather apps.
Regardless of how Accuweather measures ups to existing weather apps, it's worth a try. You can download your free copy of Accuweather for Windows Phone here (opens Zune) at the Marketplace.
