I remember when the iPad came out in April I sat in front of my MacBook and watched all the videos of new apps I could find on Youtube. The Yankees were getting a new shiny Apple tablet and I was not  - but then eventually I spent some bucks more than I would expect and bought one from the US. It’s been a great companion ever since. Among the apps I was desperately looking at on Youtube there was one that caught my attention: Weather HD.

Weather HD was a weather app for iPad that instead of showing you detailed info through menus and windows allowed you to take a look at the “real weather”. With beautiful videos for each weather condition, Weather HD managed to climb the charts of the iPad App Store and stay at the top for several weeks. The developers have now launched an iPhone version of Weather HD. Is that any good?

Upon launch Weather HD takes a few seconds to retrieve weather information for your current location, then you’ll be presented a screens showing..the sky, as the app thinks it is now. Cloudy, sunny, party cloudy, rainy - there’s a screen for that. Videos are cool, but not exactly “HD”: they’ve clearly been compressed to not produce a 500MB application, but - overall - they’re nice. In the settings you can choose between Celsius and Fahrenheit degress, enabled the on-screen clock and choose the hour format. You can also choose which data the app should display (chance of rain, pressure and visibility) and enable the night mode  - a double tap to dim the screen.

In the main weather screen you can also show the forecast for the upcoming week, or switch to hourly. The app is very fast at changing animations and videos between days.

At $0.99 in the App Store, Weather HD for iPhone (and iPad) is a good app. Maybe the larger screen of the tablet contributed to the “wow” effect, but the iPhone app gets its job done.