It’s inevitable…you’re sitting on your couch, relaxing with your tivo and your xbox…when you realize you need to <gasp> go outside! But what is the weather like? How will you know whether to wear your crocs or your docs? You could get up and go outside, but that takes effort. Luckily for you, Epocware has the excellent utility Handy Weather so you can check the weather from your Symbian phone before you have to leave the couch.
Handy Weather gives you an incredible amount of detail on the weather in your area and several other cities. I haven’t been able to determine if there is a limit to how many cities can be loaded up; I set 8 before I stopped trying. You can set your home city, and that is the one that shows on the active standby screen in Handy Shell. You get the next 5 days of forecasts right on the home screen, which makes for a handy reference (pun intended).
Once you drill down into the app itself, you get a 4 way graphic showing the day’s weather in the AM and PM. The next screen shows the week’s weather, with a line graph showing the temperature changes over the next week.
There are some other neat features if you are a bit of a weather junkie; temperature, pressure and satellite maps with a zoom in feature. Fun to play with but the zoom feature is not terribly useful, unless you are terribly interested in viewing a map of the USA’s pressure systems on a tiny screen.
Handy weather can be set to update manually, at a pre-set time, or every 12, 8, or 4 hours. It auto-updates the data in the program itself and in the handy shell plugin (if you have it). It can be purchased separately from handy shell for $24.95, or $39.95 as part of a Handy Shell+Handy Weather combo.
What I liked:
-40,000 cities to choose from.
-Detailed weather reports available.
-As accurate as a weather program can be.
What I didn’t:
-Pressure, temperature and satellite maps are not terribly useful.
-No way to set a default country (searching for a new city requires confirming USA every time).
