Ok, maybe less “outrage” and more “mild annoyance”.

After playing with the iPhone a bit I realized that my BlackBerry would be a bit more useful if I had some apps on it for various one-off features. For example, I thought it would be handy to have a weather app instead of loading up a web page.

The iPhone has Weather built-in and also has handy, free apps like WeatherBug for this.

So I did a quick search for “WeatherBug for BlackBerry” and found that they did indeed have a BlackBerry product. However, unlike the iPhone version, it costs money. Not just a one-time “buy the product” license fee either, it’s a monthly subscription fee for data that they make freely available on their web site and to iPhone users.¹ WeatherBug does have a free BlackBerry Direct app, but that only tracks one city and only shows the current temperature – and the icon really looks bad.

Then a couple weeks ago I got the Android Dev Phone and was poking around the Android marketplace. Sure enough, there is a free WeatherBug app for Android too. It’s very similar to the iPhone app, has nice features and the ability to track more than one location. And it’s free.

And in the course of looking things up for this post, I see that there is a new, free app for the BlackBerry Storm.

So why is WeatherBug trying to gouge the BlackBerry Pearl, Curve, Bold user?

1. It looks like Windows Mobile users have the same gripe. [back]