Squaring up against Handy Weather, this compact weatherman wannabee is keen to keep you on the meteorological ball with fresh forecasts from around the globe.

Judgement time…

With El Nino blowing a gale and global warming bewildering the world’s meteorological radar, predicting the weather and dressing appropriately (hotpants or waterproofs?) is like chancing your arm at a game of roulette. If only you had a smartphone weather app to help you plan your wardrobe in advance. Well slap me with a Michael Fish, because MicroWeather has just appeared on our Nokia N95 8GB to give us a rain or shine head-ups.

Compared to some weather forecasting software, MicroWeather is pretty rudimentary. It’s nowhere near as comprehensive as rival Handy Weather’s GPS based skills, text messaging talents and in depth graphage, but it still has a mean data base of worldwide locations - Base Arturo Prat in the Antarctica, anyone?

If you’re a proper globetrotter or just plain curious about weather in another country, you can add as many city or town locations to your list. It displays a weather symbol and min/max temperature on basic level, but investigate further and you get the next day forecast and a more detailed wind speed, dew point and humidity percentage breakdown. If you want a broader seven day forecast, MicroWeather shows its limitations by making you go online to WeatherBug.

You will naturally need a network connection for MicroWeather to grab updates and these can be retrieved manually or set automatically for once, twice or three times a day. One city gobbles up about 20K of data so the cash outlay won’t be too severe.

Unless you’re utterly obsessed with the weather (look, it happens as you get older) or a hardcore traveller (both domestically and global) then MicroWeather might, at a stretch, be worth the six quid asking price. It’s just shame it couldn’t offer a more wide-ranging travelling and location based service on par with it’s Handy Weather nemesis.