Originally posted at blogs.sun.com. I have (over the last few months) renewed my attempt to find a weather content site that delivered over the phone.
A friend asked me last year which site I used and I stated that I was a “look out the window kind of guy”, but the length of my work commute, and having taken up sailing has led me to change my mind recently. After a bit of mucking around with google I came across and was using Weather Online (.co.uk). This allowed me to see the Weather now, albeit somewhere else, and so enhances the ‘look out the window” channel. It also offers a three day ahead view for various UK locations, but it doesn’t do inshore, or Ramsgate. It is potentially useful for checking the weather in London before I set off in the morning.
I am still mucking around with Vodafone’s weather information services, but these seem to be a sample service; I’ll probably have to pay for what I want (which since my phone is a company one, and such fees are not considered business critical won’t happen).
It also seems that the Met Office seem to want to charge for their content delivered to the phone. I can’t make up my mind if I’m cross because I’ve already payed for it once or pleased that the public sector should recoup costs for merging content with media delivery. Of course the BBC are in the process of divesting themselves from their web delivery technology as its not seen as appropriate for public funding (or something). The ideal Met Office inshore content is here…. (.html) but I need to borrow (see stop press below) one of the new phones to see how the phone based html browsers handle it, otherwise I’ll consider screen scraping it, although I’m not sure of the legality of this. [Obviously if its illegal, I shan’t do it].
Stop Press : I’ve just done our mandatory, “how to use the phone course”, written by our finance department and run by our IT department and this states that using the mobile phone for non business, non-voice services is seriously deprecated, so if this series continues, I may have to finance it myself. However, my Sun-blogger colleague (who I’ve never met) who writes at Hinkmond Wong’s Weblog, seems to have a job that involves a better knowledge of this stuff, so check him/her out.
This article was last of the originally planned series, I might have gone on to talk about mail, but with the current screen technology its pretty unusable anyway.
I consider the nexus of these devices, networks and content to be the driver for the next stage of the internet’s growth so I doubt this is the last I’ll write about this stuff. Hopefully some of the UK Telco or content owning customers will give me a call for help in this space, but I’m not really the expert (yet).