Chances are you have a grandpa/father/uncle that watches The Weather Channel for endless hours. They forget that it is used for snippets of information on the environment and choose to make it a integral portion of the daily entertainment. If you happen to be visiting them you may get caught up in an endless loop of small tidbits of weather conditions with promises of future forecasts. It’s boring, it’s tedious, it’s un-informative and makes you want to jump off a bridge….. but old men love it! Kind of like old episodes of “Bonanza”.
Well we’re younger and cooler than the Bonanza/Weather Channel crowd, aren’t we, and our friends at Netatmo have designed the perfect new age replacement that turns the weather into something much more enjoyable. Enter the Netatmo Urban Weather Station. At your fingertips you’ll have standard long-term forecasts, but more interestingly (and certainly much cooler) you have the ability to look at time lapsed graphs for a variety of urban weather conditions inside and outside of your home.
What is an “Urban Weather Condition”? Well it goes beyond dreary statistics of basic temperature and humidity. The Netatmo also includes things such as indoor carbon dioxide concentrations, as well as the amount of noise (measured in decibels) that may be generating a general decline in your operating mojo. Check out my video hands-on below to get a feel for the features and slick design.
The Netatmo is not exactly perfect though. While the geek in me loves the ease of set-up, oodles of time lapsed graphs, and smoothness of the app – the old man in me would still like to see things like amounts of precipitation and wind speed, because frankly, when we get a big ass storm I like to brag to my friends about the amount of rain we received and the terrifying velocity of the winds. As you can tell I am the life of all of the parties at the local retirement home!
Conclusion? A well designed product which does what it does well, but with a little more work it could be excellent. It’s not cheap at $179.00, but then quality seldom is.
