Windows Phone Thoughts: Neohand Weather Center 1.08

What Can I Expect?
Weather Center does what it says it will do: it enables a user to download weather forecasts directly to a Pocket PC, no more and no less. Frankly, I would like to see Weather Center make better use of the persistent GPRS connection that Windows Mobile 2003 supports. Similar to desktop applications with a constant Internet connection, Weather Center could be designed to automatically connect to the GPRS network, at regular intervals, similar to checking e-mail, and download updated forecasts without any user interaction, but it's not and this was a disappointment for me. When a forecast is more than twelve hours old, a the program displays a message telling the user to download updated forecasts. In light of the fact that Weather Center does not automatically download forecasts, it also cannot supply real-time or near real-time weather alerts. This may not be a big deal for some; but, living in North Alabama (on the fringes of "Tornado Alley"), it would be nice to have a program that would alert me as to when I need crawl into a hole and hope for the best.


Figure 2: After forecasts are downloaded, it is easy to select which one you'd like to see.