Epic App Battles: WhatsApp versus WeChat

Update: WhatsApp is now serving a whopping 300 million monthly active users. The service has finally woken up to the opportunities it could be missing out on and has added a push-to-talk feature on its applications. Foe the whole story click here. Let me be completely honest here. I prefer chatting to talking over the phone. There is something inanely comfortable about being able to think your replies out, add funny emoticons to your conversation and generally be able to multitask while conversing. And aiding my love for chatting as a mode of connecting with my friends are cross-platform messaging apps that run on your data plan and let you keep chatting for no extra charge. The cross-platform messaging platform is undergoing a pretty little boom period now with players like Nimbuzz, Kik and Viber amongst many, many others claiming small chunks of the market with specific features catering to their respective niches.   Exchanging stickers and voice messages are kind of fun However, the one app that seems to have been catapulted into the spotlight in quite a massive way in India has been WeChat. I say “seems” because despite the app perching itself coolly on top of charts on both iOS and Android, you will almost never find more than a handful of your friends using the service at any given point of time. However, with a lot of money being pumped into a huge marketing campaign that spreads across print and television in the country, it looks like this app by China’s Tencent is here in India to stay. We decided to pit the seemingly multi-faceted WeChat against the dependable, big daddy of cross-platform messaging – WhatsApp. To most it will seem like a lost cause to pit a seemingly new app like WeChat against WhatsApp. However, those also happen to be the same guys who scoffed at Facebook on Orkut communities back in 2007 while playing fraandship-fraandship over what was lovingly described as “Scraps”. There is no denying that WhatsApp is a giant in its own right. The service, after all, is currently catering to more monthly active users than Twitter’s user base. Yes, I’m not making this up; WhatsApp’s MAU is north of 250 million users and it processes about 18 billion inbound and 12 billion outbound messages everyday. While we do not have exact figures of how many users WeChat serves, official figures on Google Play Store says that the app has been downloaded between 10,000,000-50,000,000 times and has received a rating of 4.5 on the store. On iOS too, the app is rated at 4. Dat simple interface! Nitty-grittys out of the way, if there's one area where WeChat cannot touch WhatsApp in, it's the interface. While WhatsApp’s UI – especially on Android – is as sharp as a hot knife slicing through butter, WeChat’s effort looks as jarring as your neighbouring aunty doing an item number at the society’s Ganpati Pandal. It might be ages before you actually manage to get used to WeChat’s very confusing interface if you decide to use it. There’s the main page from where you can access your chats, a contacts page where you can handle your connections and a social page that has four more options. WhatsApp, on the other hand, follows the app equivalent of the wham-bam-thank you ma’am principle. With a relatively neater interface on Android, WhatsApp has the edge when it comes to looking pleasing to the eyes. Moreover, it is far, far ahead of WeChat. It’s time WeChat too releases a Holo version of its app on Android. The stalker-friendly “Last seen at” and the tell-tale double-ticks indicating that a message sent/received are features that WeChat could do well to lift from the more experienced WhatsApp. While the well-circulated joke says that the “Last seen at feature” has been behind many a break-up, it’s a very important feature for most power cross-platform messaging users, as is the double tick system. Settings confuse, Drifts amuse What really ails WeChat is that it’s spread itself too thin. The app wants to offer a little something to everyone and so has video chat, audio messaging, social, profiles, stickers, emoticons etc; thereby essentially turning the service into a mixed bag of nothing. The service and its features are too elaborate for its own good. Right from the moment you decide to sign up for the service, you’re made to go through a slightly longish process of choosing a new username, connect it to your social networking profiles and have WeChat provide you with a whole new one called “Moments”. All WhatsApp needs is your mobile number and access to your contacts list. Then again, like a famous advertisement goes, “Itne paise mein itna-eech milega". WhatsApp’s limited features cannot hold a candle to WeChat’s elaborateness. The latter’s capabilities begin where WhatsApp’s end. Texting each other is a passé, is what WeChat believes. It allows you to send across voice messages, hold video chats, converse using the walkie-talkie mode and even like and comment on photos. Besides being a cross-platform messaging app, WeChat moonlights as a mini social networking ecosystem. WhatsApp, on the other hand, lets you message friends. Additionally, WeChat also has a brilliant web mode for accessing your chats and transferring files through the browser. I sincerely wish WhatsApp would consider incorporating this feature, making life easier for people like me who have to shift focus between phone and PC. Pleasing to the eyes For all the flak it gets for having a very confusing interface that looks extremely cluttered, WeChat has some great features too. Its social tools go largely unnoticed, and frankly, it is the service’s fault for not putting the spotlight over it. For one, there is the “Shake” feature that, based on your location, connects you to people around you or even across the globe. All you need to do is activate the feature and shake the phone. Now, we don’t know if shaking to get rid of your loneliness is a euphemism for something, but this feature could help you make new friends. Of course, you’ll have to rummage through a swamp of fraandshippers, unless that happens to be your thing. The “Look Around” feature overlaps a little with Shake and shows people using WeChat around you. The “Drift Bottle” is a fun concept of picking up floating message bottles in the proverbial WeChat sea and choosing to reply to them. WhatsApp, on the other hand, lets you message friends. If you’re on the receiving end of fraandshippers, you will need to tinker around with security settings in a big way. You can control pretty much every aspect of the service, choose who can see you, opt between letting strangers contact you and even turn-off certain annoying features. WhatsApp, on the other hand … well, you get the drift. The bottom-line here is that while WhatsApp is currently leading this race, it’s in danger of becoming the hare that fell asleep near the finish-line. If it finds solace in piggy-backing on the status quo and refuses to evolve, WeChat just might turn into the proverbial tortoise that won the race. Even so, assuming none of my friends are currently on either of the apps, I would ask them to contact me over WhatsApp for the sheer simplicity and ease with which you can use it. And even while it looks like WeChat could end up stealing a huge chunk of WhatsApp’s users over a period of time, it’s features are far too many to be able to hold the attention of people who simply want to contact their friends and loved ones.

Most of US is wired, but millions aren't plugged in

The Obama administration has poured billions of dollars into expanding the reach of the Internet, and nearly 98 percent of American homes now have access to some form of high-speed broadband. But tens of millions of people are still on the sidelines of the digital revolution.

"The job I'm trying to get now requires me to know how to operate a computer," said Elmer Griffin, 70, a retired truck driver from Bessemer, Ala., who was recently rejected for a job at an auto-parts store because he was unable to use the computer to check the inventory. "I wish I knew how, I really do. People don't even want to talk to you if you don't know how to use the Internet."

Griffin is among the roughly 20 percent of American adults who do not use the Internet at home, work and school, or by mobile device, a figure essentially unchanged since Barack Obama took office as president in 2009 and initiated a $7 billion effort to expand access, chiefly through grants to build wired and wireless systems in neglected areas of the country.

Administration officials and policy experts say they are increasingly concerned that a significant portion of the population, around 60 million people, is shut off from jobs, government services, health care and education, and that the social and economic effects of that gap are looming larger. Persistent digital inequality - caused by the inability to afford Internet service, disinterest or a lack of computer literacy - is also deepening racial and economic disparities in the United States, experts say.

"As more tasks move online, it hollows out the offline options," said John B. Horrigan, a senior research fellow at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies. "A lot of employers don't accept offline job applications. It means if you don't have the Internet, you could be really isolated."

Seventy-six percent of white American households use the Internet, compared with 57 percent of African-American households, according to the "Exploring the Digital Nation," a Commerce Department report released this summer and based on 2011 data.

The figures also show that Internet use overall is much higher among those with at least some college experience and household income of more than $50,000.

Low adoption rates among older people remain a major hurdle. Slightly more than half of Americans 65 and older use the Internet, compared with well over three-quarters of those under 65.

In addition, Internet use is lowest in the South, particularly in Mississippi, Alabama and Arkansas.

Willa Ohnoutka, 78, who has lived in the same house in suburban Houston for 40 years, said she did not use the Internet at all. "I use my telephone," Ohnoutka said. "I get news on the TV. I'm just not comfortable involving myself with that Internet."

Others cite expense as the reason they do not use the Internet.

"I am cheap," said Craig Morgan, 23, a self-employed carpenter from Oxford, Miss. So far, he has made do without the Internet at home, but while he has used a smartphone to connect, that has limitations, he said.

"When we came home from the hospital with our new baby two months ago," the hospital "took pictures and put them online," he said. "We had to go to my in-laws to order them."

Gloria Bean, 41, an elementary school teaching assistant from Calhoun City, Miss., said cost was also a reason she had not had Internet access at home for three years.

"I just couldn't afford it," she said. Being cut off, she said, "has affected me and my children."

"They have to have it for school to do research for a paper or something they need for class," Bean said.

As a result, she added, she often rushes from her job at school to pick up her children and take them to the library, where there are 10 computers.

The Obama administration allocated $7 billion to broadband expansion as part of the 2009 economic stimulus package. Most of it went to build physical networks. About half of those infrastructure programs have been completed, with Internet availability growing to 98 percent of homes from fewer than 90 percent.

About $500 million from the package went toward helping people learn to use the Internet. Those programs were highly successful, though on a small scale, producing more than half a million new household subscribers to Internet service, Commerce Department statistics show.

"We recognize more work needs to be done to ensure that no Americans are left behind," said John B. Morris Jr., director of Internet policy at the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, part of the Commerce Department. "Increasing the level of broadband adoption is a complex, multifaceted challenge with no simple, one-size-fits-all solution."

The percentage of people 18 years and older in the United States who have adopted the Internet over the past two decades has grown at a rate not seen since the popularization of the telephone, soaring nearly fivefold, from 14 percent in 1995. Although that growth slowed in more recent years, it had still moved close to 80 percent of the population by the beginning of the Obama administration in 2009, according to several academic and government studies.

Since then, however, the number has not budged, shifting between 74 and 79 percent through 2011, according to one study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project. Pew's most recent research shows the figure fluttering this year between 81 and 85 percent, a slight uptick that experts attribute to the still-growing popularity of smartphones. Most smartphone users also have home connections, however, and do not face the affordability or digital literacy problems that have caused Internet adoption to remain stagnant.

Even at that level of Internet adoption, however, the United States, with the world's largest economy by far, ranked seventh among 20 major global economies in 2012, down from fourth in 2000, according to the International Telecommunication Union, a United Nations agency. Ranking ahead of the United States were Britain, Canada, South Korea, Germany, France and Australia, as well as nearly every other smaller country in Western Europe.

Aaron Smith, a senior researcher at the Pew Project, said that when the center asked nonusers if they believed they were missing out or were disadvantaged by not using the Internet, most of the older Americans said no, it was not relevant to them. "But when you excluded the seniors," he added, "most people said, Yeah, I feel like I'm not getting the access to all the things that I need."

Researchers say the recent recession probably contributed to some of the flattening in Internet adoption, just as the Great Depression stalled the arrival of home telephone service. But a significant portion of nonusers cite their lack of digital literacy skills as a discouraging factor.

Some programs, like the federally financed Smart Communities, have shown promising results. Smart Communities, a $7 million effort in Chicago that was part of the administration's $7 billion investment, provided basic Internet training in English and Spanish for individuals and small businesses. Between 2008 and 2011, the Smart Communities participants registered a statistically significant 15 percentage-point increase in Internet use compared with that in other Chicago community areas.

The Federal Communications Commission and some Internet providers have started programs to make Internet service more affordable for low-income households. Comcast's 2-year-old Internet Essentials program, which offers broadband service for $10 a month to low-income families, has signed up 220,000 households out of 2.6 million eligible homes in Comcast service areas.

Those types of programs hold promise, administration officials say, but they remain unsatisfied. "I've seen enough to know that we're making good progress," said Thomas C. Power, the administration's deputy chief technology officer for telecommunications. "But I also know we need to make more progress."

© 2013, The New York Times News Service

Texting your feelings, symbol by symbol

I recently had to sit my friend down for a modern-day digital intervention. It wasn't that he was using his phone at dinner, or that he was hitting "reply all" on email threads, or leaving unnecessary voice mail messages. No, this was much worse.

A few weeks ago my friend, Michael Galpert, a 30-year-old startup entrepreneur living in New York City, was visiting the West Coast for work. I set him up on a date with a friend who lives in Los Angeles. The first date went well and the two decided to see each other again.

When Michael returned to New York, he and his new romantic interest started text messaging, and, as you often do if you are of a certain tech-savvy set, were communicating via emoji. As my colleague Jenna Wortham explained this year, emoji are the cartoonlike and more elaborate cousins of emoticons - those combinations of colons, parentheses and other punctuation that can convey expressions like a smile or a wink. ;-)

The woman Michael was courting would type sweet nothings to him using emoji icons - a lady dancing, high heels or a martini with an olive - and this is where things went awry. Michael would respond with the "thumbs up" emoji, a hand that looks as if it belongs to an inflated cartoon character. When she would text "I'm excited to see you," followed by a pink heart, Michael would respond with a thumbs up.

The woman confided to me and a friend that she believed that based on his use of emoji, Michael was clearly not interested in her and just wanted to be friends. "It's like he's saying 'Hey, dude' or 'Sure, bro' when he sends me that emoji," she told me. "It's not cute."

That's when I had to intervene.

Sure, it might sound a bit odd that a new, long-distance relationship could fizzle because a tiny icon was misused, yet these types of messaging miscommunications happen often (though perhaps not quite as comically). The emoji icons can be baffling to the American adults who, whether they realize it or not, are taking their social cues from Japanese teenagers.

But adults in the U.S. are not the first grown-ups with a tin ear for emoji.

"In Japan, there was a similar, interesting moment when you started to see older folks and men start using these kind of cute aspects - these emoji - that originally came from middle-school girl, mobile-phone culture," said Mimi Ito, a cultural anthropologist at the University of California, Irvine, who studies how young people use digital media in Asia and the United States. "Now, as emoji are seeing more adoption in the U.S., you're seeing a form of communication being used that was clearly developed and marketed to a different demographic."

Emoji date back to 1995, when people used pagers instead of smartphones and NTT DoCoMo, Japan's biggest cellular phone operator, added a small heart icon to its pagers. The heart spread rapidly among Japanese teenagers because it allowed them to express an emotion that was almost impossible to portray in small snippets of text.

While emoji made their way to the United States a few years later, not many people used them until 2011, when Apple included the symbols in iOS 5, the company's mobile operating system.

But Apple was not trying to woo U.S. customers when it introduced the colorful pictorial icons. It was going after Japanese teenagers, said Fred Benenson, a data engineer at Kickstarter and the author of "Emoji Dick," a recreation of Herman Melville's classic novel, "Moby-Dick," told entirely in emoji.

Benenson said that once Apple added emoji to iOS - they required a separate downloadable app but are now available in a manually activated keyboard - it was apparent that they could be used to tell a much longer story. But, he warned, sometimes emoji can be lost in translation.

"There are these blind spots with emoji, as a lot of choices for the icons bias towards Japanese culture," he said.

There are plenty of emoji for Japanese food like sushi, ramen noodles and mochi balls on a skewer. There are also lots of animals, including a dog, cat, mouse, bunny, frog and two camels. Unfortunately, emoji for slices of Americana like tacos and hot dogs are hard to find.

U.S. companies like Facebook have recently taken to emoji. But Facebook has been learning that the 1 billion-plus people who communicate across its social network not only speak many different languages but also use emoji differently. Greg Marra, a Facebook product manager, recently traveled to India and Japan to better understand the differences.

"We discovered that in the Asian culture, the expression on an emoji face isn't necessarily what conveys emotion. It's the context of where that face is located," Marra said.

In Asian cultures, an emoji face in dark clouds would show that someone is sad and having a bad day. A face on a beach with the sun glaring means they are happy. In the United States, the emotion on the face tells the story, not the surroundings. Also, "stars for eyes could mean something completely different in Asia than using dots for eyes," he said.

Eventually, though, Americans will catch on.

"Usually we see about a 10-year lag from when a new communication is adopted and when it becomes a norm," Ito said. "We're somewhere in the middle of that curve right now as an American-specific emoji culture forms in the U.S."

As for Michael, things didn't work out with the woman he was inadvertently insulting. But he said he learned a lesson along the way. "I'm no longer using the thumbs-up emoji," he said recently. "I've switched it out for the star emoji."

© 2013, The New York Times News Servic

Indian telecom subscriber crosses 90 crore: TRAI

Registering a marginal growth, Indian telecom subscriber base crossed 90 crore-mark in May this year after almost two years.

The base grew by 0.34 percent to reach 90.005 crore, according to TRAI data.

This is the second time the subscriber base is breaching the 90 crore-mark. Earlier in June 2012, it had touched 96.55 crore. Since then the base has been shrinking steadily. The first time it crossed the 90 crore-mark was in September 2011.

"The number of telephone subscribers in India increased to 900.05 million at the end of May, 2013 from 897.02 million at the end of April 2013, thereby showing a monthly growth rate of 0.34 percent," TRAI said in a report Friday.

Mobile or wireless subscriber base increased from 86.7 crore in April 2013 to 87 crore at the end of May 2013, registering a monthly growth of 0.37 percent.

Reliance Communications led the growth in mobile business by adding over 12 lakh new customers, followed by Vodafone with over 9 lakh new customers, Idea Cellular 8.67 lakh, Airtel 8.51 lakh, Aircel 2.77 lakh new customers.

New operator Videocon saw maximum growth in percentage terms during the month. The mobile subscriber base of Videocon grew by 6.79 percent to 22.85 lakhs in May from 21.39 in previous month.

State-run BSNL and MTNL lost 9 lakh and 97,583 customers respectively in May taking their total customer base to 9.80 crore and 48 lakhs respectively.

Bharti Airtel maintained its lead in overall market share with total subscriber base of over 18.96 crore. Airtel leadership was followed by Vodafone with over 15.46 crore customers. RCom and Idea Cellular's total customer base stood very close to each other at 12.48 crore and 12.37 crore respectively

Google Nexus 7 vs iPad mini, Kindle Fire and others

Google Inc. has announced new versions of its Nexus 7 tablet computers. It has better features and a higher price tag.

The new models are available in the U.S. starting Tuesday through Google's online Play store and the following retailers: Best Buy, Gamestop, Walmart, Staples, Office Max, Office Depot, Amazon, Home Shopping Network, Radio Shack, J&R and B&H Photo. A version with cellular capability is coming later with support for T-Mobile and Verizon.

Here's a look at how the new Nexus 7 compares with last year's model and other tablets with comparable screens.

Google's Nexus 7

Price: $229 with 16 gigabytes of storage, $269 for 32 GB. Add $80 for 32 GB model with cellular capability.

Screen size: 7 inches diagonally

Screen resolution: 1920 x 1200 (323 pixels per inch)

Size: height: 7.87 inches; width 4.49 inches; thickness: 0.34 inch (200 by 114 by 8.65 millimeters)

Weight: 10.2 ounces (290 grams) for base model, 10.5 ounces (299 grams) for cellular version

Cameras: 5 megapixel rear camera, 1.2 megapixel front-facing camera

Battery life: 9 hours

Operating system: Google's Android

ProsAccess to a variety of games, utilities and other software for Android devices, though not as extensive as apps available for iPad. Option for cellular wireless broadband.

Cons
Data storage cannot be expanded with memory cards.

Google's Nexus 7 (2012 model)

Price: $199 with 16 gigabytes of storage, $249 with 32 GB. Add $50 for 32 GB model with cellular capability.

Screen size: 7 inches diagonally

Screen resolution: 1280 x 800 pixels (216 pixels per inch)

Size: height 7.81 inches; width: 4.72 inches; thickness: 0.41 inch (198.5 by 120 by 10.45 millimeters)

Weight: 12 ounces (340 grams) for base model, 12.2 ounces (347 grams) for cellular version

Cameras: Front-facing, 1.2 megapixel camera

Battery life: 8 hours

Operating system: Google's Android

Pros
Access to a variety of games, utilities and other software for Android devices, though not as extensive as apps available for iPad. Option for cellular wireless broadband.

Cons
Data storage cannot be expanded with memory cards.

Apple's iPad Mini

Price: $329 for base model with Wi-Fi only and 16 gigabytes of storage, $429 with 32 GB, $529 with 64 GB. Add $130 for versions with cellular capability.

Screen size: 7.9 inches diagonally

Screen resolution: 1024 by 768 pixels (163 pixels per inch)

Size: height 7.87 inches; width: 5.3 inches; thickness: 0.28 inch (200 by 134.7 by 7.2 millimeters)

Weight: 10.9 ounces (308 grams) for base model, 11 ounces (312 grams) for cellular version

Cameras: 5-megapixel camera on back and a low-resolution camera on front, for videoconferencing

Battery life: 10 hours

Operating system: Apple's iOS

Pros
Unmatched access to third-party applications, high-quality Apple software and the iTunes store. High-resolution screen. Available with access to fast 4G wireless broadband networks, starting at $459.

Cons
Data storage cannot be expanded with memory cards.

Barnes & Noble's Nook HD

Price: $129 with 8 gigabytes of storage, $149 with 16 GB

Screen size: 7 inches diagonally

Screen resolution: 1440 by 900 pixels (243 pixels per inch)

Size: height 7.65 inches; width: 5 inches; thickness: 0.43 inch (194.4 by 127.1 by 11 millimeters)

Weight: 11.1 ounces (315 grams)

Cameras: None

Battery life: Up to 10.5 hours of reading and up to 9 hours of video

Operating system: Modified version of Google's Android

Pros
Expandable with microSD card. High-definition screen. Larger-screen version available.

Cons
Selection of third-party applications is small. Lacks cameras and option for cellular broadband.

Amazon.com's Kindle Fire HD.

Price: $199 with 16 gigabytes of storage, $229 with 32 GB

Screen size: 7 inches diagonally

Screen resolution: 1280 by 800 pixels (216 pixels per inch)

Size: height: 7.6 inches; width: 5.4 inches; thickness: 0.4 inch (193 by 137 by 10.3 millimeters)

Weight: 13.9 ounces (395 grams)

Cameras: Front-facing camera.

Battery life: 11 hours.

Operating system: Modified version of Google's Android

Pros
Cheap and portable. Convenient access to Amazon store. High-definition screen. Dolby audio. Larger-screen version available, including option for cellular broadband.

Cons
Small selection of third-party applications available from Amazon. No rear camera for taking video and photos. Data storage cannot be expanded with memory cards.

Amazon.com's regular Kindle Fire

Price: $159 with 8 gigabytes of storage

Screen size: 7 inches diagonally

Screen resolution: 1024 by 600 pixels (170 pixels per inch)

Size: height 7.44 inches; width: 4.72 inches; thickness: 0.45 inch (189 by 120 by 11.5 millimeters)

Weight: 14.1 ounces (400 grams)

Cameras: none

Battery life: 8.5 hours.

Operating system: Modified version of Google's Android

Pros
Cheap and portable. Convenient access to Amazon store.

Cons
No-frills tablet lacks camera and microphone. Small selection of third-party applications available from Amazon. Data storage cannot be expanded with memory cards. No option for cellular wireless broadband

Plants vs. Zombies 2 launched for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch as a free download

PopCap Games has announced the worldwide availability of Plants vs. Zombies 2, the highly anticipated sequel to Plants vs. Zombies. The game will be initially available for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch as a free download.

Featuring a time-travel theme that propels players through different historical eras to face off with zombies from various time periods, Plants vs. Zombies 2 is available initially in seven different languages, with PopCap promising support for additional languages 'soon'.

Designed as an ever-expanding universe that will offer regular updates including new worlds full of new plants, zombies and challenges beyond the first three that comprise the initial game, Plants vs. Zombies 2 extends the gameplay of the original and provides players with dozens of all-new levels, plants and zombies.

With Plants vs. Zombies 2, EA (who acquired PopCap in 2011) is going with the 'freemium' model that was quite successful with Real Racing 3. According to EA, "most of the game is entirely free to play" with players having the ability to "face every zombie and access every level in every world at no cost".

In addition to new places to explore and discover, Plants vs. Zombies 2 includes a variety of gameplay enhancements, including Plant Food, which drops from glowing zombies and offers a temporary but powerful boost to your plant attacks. Plants vs. Zombies 2 also includes all-new gesture-based power-ups that enable players to interact with zombies directly, to augment their plant defences.

Plants vs. Zombies 2 is now available as a free download for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch and will be available on other platforms 'later this year and beyond.'

iPhone-like Yahoo Weather app comes to Android

Yahoo has launched a brand new Weather app for Android smartphones, with visual design and features in line with the iPhone version of the app that was launched earlier this year.

The app provides forecasts on top of slideshows featuring pictures of landmarks in cities chosen by the user. The photos are powered by another Yahoo property, Flickr.

Yahoo Weather for Android is now available as a free 11MB download from the Google Play Store. It requires Android 2.3 Gingerbread or above.

Yahoo Weather app for Android release notes

The highly-acclaimed Yahoo! Weather app is now available on Android, featuring stunning photos that match current weather conditions and an ALL new design with a ton of new features. See the weather like never before. Easily swipe for the most accurate weather forecasts or add a home screen widget for the latest weather information. Wherever you go, the forecast is beautiful.

Favorite features:

• Highly acclaimed design with beautiful photos that match your location, time of day, and current weather condition
• Detailed weather information, including 10-day and 24-hour temperature forecasts
• Interactive radar, satellite, heat, and wind maps
• Severe weather alerts
• Animated sunrise & sunset times and wind & pressure modules
• Humidity sensor, UV index, and chance of precipitation
• New home screen widgets

Tips:

• Swipe vertically for detailed weather information
• Swipe horizontally for favorite locations
• All photos in the app are from users like you. Submit yours at http://www.flickr.com/projectweather