WeatherEye for BlackBerry

If you're on the go a lot, you probably do not have the time to sit around waiting for the weather segment on your local newscast. If you live on the East Coast, in tropical or sub-tropical regions, or in the hurricane belt, the weather patterns can change on a dime. Since most BlackBerry devices are location aware thanks to their GPS radios, it is easy to find the local weather conditions from your BlackBerry. Applications like WeatherEye make it even easier, since you do not have to surf the Web to find the local conditions.

Installing WeatherEye through BlackBerry App World is a breeze. After launching the application, we were greeted with a language selection page where you choose between English and French. On BlackBerry 6, the application failed to sense when the device was reoriented in landscape mode, so we were forced to work in portrait mode. Once we chose English and entered the language, the City Search page also did not recognize when the device was rotated into landscape mode.

Since WeatherEye is location enabled, when you click the Add locations near you option on the City Search screen, you will be presented with a list of local cities. After choosing your city from the list, your local weather information will be displayed. WeatherEye allows you to see both short term and long term forecasts in addition to the current conditions and hourly forecast. The WeatherEye icon also changes to indicate the current weather patterns, so you do not have to launch the application to get basic weather information.

WeatherEye is a very basic application, but it still allows you to add multiple cities to your list. If you travel a lot between two locations, this feature makes it easy to switch back and forth depending on your location. WeatherEye also allows you to display the temperature in Farenheit or Celsius, and see the units in Imperial or Metric measurements. You can also choose to have the application refresh between every 15 minutes and 3 hours.

The interface was difficult to use and is not completely touch enabled, so using it on BlackBerry 6 is difficult at best. There are also ads displayed in the application, which take up space on the screen that could be used to make the text throughout the application more readable.

Pros

• Free
• Updates icon with current weather conditions

Cons

• Not fully touchscreen enabled
• Does not recognize landscape mode
• Inefficient use of screen space
• Ads on almost every screen

WeatherEye is a very basic application that needs a lot more development to become truly useful. It is barely usable on BlackBerry 6, has a poorly laid out interface, and looks outdated. Until WeatherEye updates the application to work better in BlackBerry 6, you should consider trying other available weather applications.