This week we have updates about significant upgrades to a couple of products that we’ve reviewed previously. First up, we have a new version of Storm Predator published by IntelliWeather.
We reviewed it just over a year ago, and the latest release, Version 3, has been polished significantly.
Storm Predator is a program that downloads weather data for your locality. It displays radar images and weather alerts, but also watches for bad weather entering a user-defined zone. When such events occur, Storm Predator sends alerts via e-mail, cell phone and pager, and creates graphics for Web pages and cell phones.
Apart from a number of bugs being fixed and improved display performance, the biggest changes in this release are in the user interface. The changes include the smoothing of the radar echo layer (this improves the image when magnified) and three new, optional display layers: a topological layer, a custom layer and a lightning layer.
The lightning layer shows detected lightning strikes. The strike locations are shown in a bright color, which is then faded over time to make storm paths easier to visualize.
Another addition is a square display as an alternative to the circular, radar-type display of the previous version. Also, you now can have National Weather Service warnings overlaid on the display as they are issued.
In this release the colors of the user interface can be configured but the rest of the graphics can’t be changed, which is a shame – the product’s look is still somewhat clunky.
An important change is that the weather data display and layers now are geographically accurate, which makes modifications to the static layers, such as roads, using an external paint program as accurate as needed. Measuring distances and selecting locations also can be done more precisely.
This version is a significant improvement. For existing 2.x users the upgrade costs $20; new users can purchase a one-off license for $40.
Our next product update is hardware: In April we reviewed the Wolverine MVP 60GB Portable Multimedia Storage and Player and the pricing correction in from Wolverine Data.
The Wolverine MVP is a pretty good MP3 player, a good photo displayer and a good video player, as well as a very good multistandard storage-media offloading device.
Wolverine Data recently released a version of the player called the Wolverine ESP.
The ESP gets rid of the MVP’s cheap plastic look and has more capabilities than the MVP. It adds a voice recorder (a microphone is built in), a video recorder (which includes a scheduler and requires an optional cradle), an FM radio and games, along with a bigger display (3.6 inches, though it’s not widescreen format) and a better battery life (as many as 13 hours for music playback, as many as four hours of video viewing, or 20GB of memory card data transfer). The ESP costs $50 to $70 more than the MVP, depending on disk size.
All its features work reasonably well, but the ESP uses the same clunky user interface as the MVP. This interface is harder to use than it should be, and while we forgave it on the first-generation MVP, it’s disappointing to see it more or less unchanged.
Wolverine Data positions the ESP as a product for specialized users, such as photographers looking for a compact field backup device. Priced at $400 for 80GB, $450 for 100GB, $500 for 120GB (the cradle costs $80), the ESP is not priced as competitively as it was. Competitors’ products, such as Apple’s 80GB iPod (priced at $350), don’t provide all of the ESP’s features, but the ESP’s lack of polish makes for a less appealing package. We’d rate the new ESP as a poor buy.
