The best in BlackBerry weather applications, take 2

It feels like so long ago that we created the best in BlackBerry weather applications list. Yet it wasn’t even a year. Time flies when there’s a lot of BlackBerry news and opinions to sift through. When I was thinking of topics for today’s post, ran across news that BBWeather got an update. I looked back over the old list of applications, and decided that it needed an update. There are enough free options now that we probably don’t need to worry about those paid ones — especially of the yearly- or quarterly-license variety.

BBWeather

Yes, the one that inspired this post leads off. BBWeather is, as BlackBerry News says, “one of the best free apps ever created for the BlackBerry.” I agree. Well, I kind of agree. If you’ll refer back to the original weather apps post, you’ll see a little note about BBWeather and the 88xx series. That bug, as one would imagine at this point, is gone, so you can use it as normal. Best of all, you can set custom home screen icons which display the relevant conditions. For instance, you can have the temperature show as the default icon, and then the conditions when you roll over it. BBWeather is still awesome and still free. You can get it at Tateu’s website OTA or sideloaded. If you’re running OS 4.2 for some reason, you can get the official BBweather 0.83 here. The newer version is in alpha, so there are still likely some bugs.

YWeather

Free is great. Free and simple is even better. That’s what you get with YWeather. It comes to us from the folks who created the BlackBerry Remeber the Milk client, and it utilizes Yahoo!’s weather RSS feed to deliver the information. It’s a great idea, really. Take advantage of a free platform and put out your own free software using it. As with before, you can get YWeather at the BBRTM website. It has versions for OS 4.1 and below, and for OS 4.2 and above. Additionally, it’s available OTA or as a desktop download. And finally, there’s a BES version for OS 4.2 or higher if you’re having troubles with the regular install.

The Weather Channel

The Weather Channel is part of most people’s days. Or at least people who have TV and time to watch it. Weather.com has also become a staple of our online diets — it has an Alexa traffic ranking of 118. Clearly, there’s incentive to bring that to a mobile format. In the last version of the weather applications feature, we talked about the Weather Channel mobile application, which unfortunately costs a bit: $12.99 per quarter or $34.99 per year. You might want to keep up with your weather, but at what cost? Thankfully, there’s a free alternative right from the same outlet. Just go to weather.com on your BlackBerry device. You can then enter in your ZIP code and get all the relevant weather information. You can get your current conditions and forecast, including the 36-hour breakdown and the 10-day outlook. You can even navigate and find your local video forecast, which plays right on your BlackBerry media player. So unless you’re a hardcore weather junkie, there’s no reason to get the app. Just go to the website.

Mobile.BlackBerry.Com

If you point your BlackBerry browser to mobile.blackberry.com, you’ll see a number of applications. On the homepage go to News & Weather, and then click Weather on the subsequent screen. There are plenty of options, though not all of them are free. What a shame. I don’t imagine it’s easy to compete with other weather apps when yours is paid and there are plenty of free alternatives. Watch out for WeatherBug here, which is certainly paid, but does offer a free trial. Ditto Weather Channel, though we’ve been over this one. Two options stand about the others: AccuWeather.com BlackBerry Web Signals, and Push Weather. Both are free services which push weather data right to your BlackBerry. With so many free applications available, the push feature helps differentiate these two.

Other options

If you’re a fan of WeatherBug (and Rae is), you can check out their free application. From what I understand it provides limited forecasts, at least compared to the paid application. Again, I don’t have experience with it because of all the other options which I consider superior. Plus, as noted last time, there’s a website called PDA Weather Products which can provide some interesting, free, weather information.

About the Author

Joe Pawlikowski is the Senior Editor at MobileMoo.com and has been covering the mobile industry full time since 2007. When he's not writing about the tech scene, he can be found discussing his personal love - baseball (and more specifically the New York Yankees) as well as writing on his personal blog.