Every morning, before heading out the door to work, I pick up my smart phone or tablet (whichever is closer to hand) and run the Weather Channel app to see whether I'll need to tote along my bumbershoot in case of the advent of inclement precipitation. In the cooler seasons I'll do the same to see which jacket I'll need to don. Sure, all the mobile platforms come with built-in weather apps, but those can't hold a candle in the wind to Weather.com's free, in-depth, up-to-the-minute, deep yet concise coverage.

There are actually two versions of the app: One for any Windows Phone user, and a Nokia version that adds a few more features, which I'll discuss later. For now, let's take a walk through setting up and using the Weather Channel app available to all Windows Phone users.

As you'd expect, the app requires access to your location to be worth much, so at install you'd probably better accept the privacy warning prompt. Next, so that there's no confusion over whether 30 degrees is cold or hot, if you're in one of the three countries on earth that don't use the metric system—the Burma, Liberia, and the United States—you can choose Imperial measurements, as opposed to the Celsius units used by the rest of the developed and undeveloped world.

Interface

The first run of the app has a small delay, but if you've allowed location sharing, after a few seconds, you'll see your local temperature, the next three day's forecast, and any alerts about severe conditions. When I tested the app on my Nokia Lumia 928, I saw two such alerts—a Heat Advisory and an Air Quality Alert. Tapping the orange notification opened a page with more info on these conditions.

Tapping on the weekday entry below the big temperature number opens an hourly table of upcoming conditions, showing projected temperature, precipitation, and wind. This is very useful if you know you'll be outside during the day. Swiping right show the 36-hour forecast, and swiping again opens a table for the next 10 day's weather, including a graph showing the rise and fall of high and low temperatures and each day's percent chance of rain. It's a really clear and nifty view, especially when it's fixing to cool off, as it finally is at testing time.

You can swipe through three more sections in the app in addition to the current conditions page: radar map, video, and menu. You can select a number of map overlays—radar, clouds, both, UV, temperature, feels like, dew point, and wind speed, as well as the past 24 hours precipitation. You can pan and zoom around the map to see conditions in other areas, and just hit the location button to get back to where you currently are.

Though I've read comments in the Windows Phone app store claiming that the animated weather maps were too many hours old to be useful, that was not my experience in testing the maps. I saw a radar map for Pittsburgh that ended just 4 minutes prior to the testing time.