WeatherLive was recently updated to version 5.0 to add Windows Phone 8 support with includes wide live tiles with radar imagery. The good news is that with the update WeatherLive is now a free, ad-supported app. The bad news is if you want all the features of WeatherLive, you'll have to upgrade within the app. While the new live tile feature is nice, you may want to hold off on updating though.
The layout on WeatherLive remains basically the same (except for the banner ad) with pages detailing a ten day forecast, charting daily weather trends, viewing historical graphs, viewing an hourly forecast, viewing a charted temperature trend, animated radar, local webcams, and a moon phase page.
Settings cover managing your locations, choosing a theme (Metro, Metro Minimalist, and Glass), choosing your Live Tile refresh rate, and display options (Celsius vs. Fahrenheit, background images, etc.). Speaking of the Live Tile, it's a little on the plain side with the moon phase and temperature on one side and a two day forecast (weather icon and forecasted temperature) on the flip.
WeatherLive, at least the previous version, is a decent weather app for your Windows Phone but I couldn't help but feel in making the app free, the developer converted it into more or less a trial version. For $.99 you remove the ads and have access to all three themes (free version only lets you use the Metro Theme). For $1.49 you remove the ads, give you access to all three themes, and open up the option to put radar and satellite images on your Live Tile.
On top of having to end up paying for all the WeatherLive features, the app is a little on the buggy side. With no rhyme or reason the formatting of the pages would go off-center and the ability to swipe disappeared. Fixing the performance error was easily done by hitting the back button and everything returned to normal.
Again, we found WeatherLive to be a nice weather app for our Windows Phone but removing the paid app from the Windows Phone Store in favor for a limited functioning, ad supported, free version is a little bit of a head scratcher. A step backwards maybe? If you are already using WeatherLive on your Windows Phone, I would be very hesitant to update to version 5.0.
If you haven't installed WeatherLive and want to give it a try, you can find WeatherLive here at the Windows Phone Store. Oddly, at the time of this post version 5.0 was only available through the Windows Phone Store app. The older version, version 4.2 is still being shown through the online Store. It may take a bit for all the Windows Phone Stores to get on the same page.
Thanks, Michelle, for the tip!
