There is of course a very simple way to assess the weather outside using your iPhone that costs absolutely nothing. Grab your iPhone, grip it tightly in one hand and open a window. Stick your phone out, and then back in again. If the phone's wet, it's raining. If it's dry, it's not. If your phone is now missing, you've just been robbed.
If you actually want to turn your phone on, there's a few options open to you. iPhones come with Google's rudimentary Weather App, which will give you simple temperature forecasts and weather predictions, but they're not exactly detailed, or for that matter all that frequently updated.
 |
Aus Weather: free app with a little more weather prediction built in
|
Staying in the realm of free, there's a couple of App store options open to you. Worqbench's Aus Weather is a simple app which, like the rest of the local crowd uses the publicly available Bureau of Meterology forecasts to provide locational weather information. There's a free version of Pocket Weather, appropriately named Pocket Weather Lite which mirrors the paid application relatively closely.
 |
| Skins, plenty of data and a great interface make PocketWeather a winner. |
If you're willing to spend a bit of money -- and in the case of local weather apps, it's not a whole lot of money -- there's a duo of locally developed applications that should send weather afficionados into fits of joy. Oz Weather is the better known of the two, and will set you back $2.49. The same price applies to the paid version of Pocket Weather, which for our money is the current front-runner in local weather apps. It includes nifty weather-specific features like pressure readings, tide information and even different skins that activate with a simple shake.
 |
| OzWeather: A great weather app with plenty of information on show |
 |
| Weather: Simple, functional, and already built into your iPhone |
Also in this series, Amazing apps for your phone:
Part 3: top 3 twitter clients for iPhone
Part 2: here's how to get cheap iPhone apps
Part 1: How to make the most out of your iPhone's GPS