Weather Wallpaper is a Windows Phone 8 app that, as the title suggests, lets you integrate your local weather information into your lockscreen wallpaper.
While other weather apps are out there that offer lockscreen support, Amazing Weather HD comes to mind, Weather Wallpaper gives you the option as to which wallpapers to use. You can use weather related images provided by Bing, Bing's image of the day or your own photo.
The user interface for Weather Wallpaper is simple, straight forward and only takes one page. You have options to turn on/off updating the lockscreen, your choice of weather units (fahrenheit vs. celcius), choose your weather forecast location, and choose which image you want to use.
Should you choose your own image, you'll be taken to the Pictures Hub where you can choose an image, crop it and set it as your wallpaper.
The weather data displayed at the top of the lockscreen includes:
- An icon illustrating the current weather conditions
- Current temperature with a "feels like" temperature
- Forecasted high/low temperature for the current date
- Forecasted high/low temperature and conditions for the next day
Weather Wallpaper also has Live Tile support that will display the same weather data. Weather information is provided by Yahoo Weather and data is updated twice an hour. Updates were a little on the slow side though and at times, painfully slow. There were times in which twice an hour was more like twice a day.
Weather Wallpaper's strength is that you can add weather information to your lockscreen without giving up your own images as the wallpaper. It's a feature every weather app with lockscreen support should have.
While it's a nice app there is room for improvement most notably with reliable updates. Weather Wallpaper lacks any options as to what weather information is displayed or how frequent the data is refreshed. Also, the Live Tile is a little on the dull side displaying information only on one side of the tile. You can't help but feel the Live Tile is missing something.
It would be nice if Weather Wallpaper had lockscreen and Live Tile options similar to what we see with other weather apps that let you choose what information is displayed and the frequency of the updates.
Still...Weather Wallpaper is an option worth trying for your Windows Phone 8 lockscreens. It just needs a little fine tuning. There is a trial version available with the full version running $.99. You can find Weather Wallpaper here in the Windows Phone Store.
