That’s where The Weather Channel’s eponymous app comes in. Type in your post code or use your phone’s GPS to select a location and you’re presented with a wealth of meteorological information. Aside from basic temperature statistics, a small graphic indicates local weather and wind conditions, humidity, visibility and even the UV index. A quartet of tabs also opens up forecasts for the coming hours, days and weeks.

The innocuous-looking Map It button on each current forecast unleashes another torrent of useful information. Take the selection of layers that can be used on top of Google Maps: radar and cloud cover can be selected individually or mashed up, and zoom controls allow you to get a handle on the weather in your town or, if you’re interested, across entire continents.

Other colour-coded layers highlight rain or snowfall in the past 24 hours, and the current temperature and wind speed can be similarly mapped. There’s also a button that will advance these layers through the next 24 hours, step-by-step, and cities, schools, airports and other landmarks can be flagged up alongside your favourite places, which are saved for easy access.

The final piece of The Weather Channel’s puzzle is its trio of widgets. They come in three sizes – one that takes up a quarter of a homescreen, another that stretches across the width of your desktop and a third that occupies just a single tile – and are customisable, with options available to choose location, units of measurement and notification settings.

So, a huge a range of information, versatile map layers and a handy widget in an attractive, free app. It’s far better than the simple weather tool that’s included with Android and, if you like to keep an eye on the skies, it’s an essential download.

Want more great Android apps? Check out our previous Android Apps of the Week or read our 36 Best Android Apps feature.

Some bright spark has taken Google Maps’ rendition of Hong Kong and sprinkled it liberally with two-dimensional, isometric goodness. Forget Street View, forget Bing’s Bird’s Eye view – this is better. Much, much better.

The sheer attention to detail is staggering. Every building is lovingly built, pixel by pixel, and even the slides in the park and goalposts on the playing field are rendered in tiny, pixellated loveliness. In fact, the only thing that could make this any better would be a SimCity-esque disaster. We’d pay good money to see Godzilla stomping through the metropolis, crushing it into tiny, tiny pieces.

Don’t take my word for it, though, go and wonder at the sheer, unadulterated brilliance yourself.

You may remember that a while ago I reviewed a Logitech keyboard that tracked key presses. Well, I’ve been using it at my desk since then, and I’ve just passed into seven figures. It’s still going strong despite a few coffee-related mishaps, although I’m still not using any of the more esoteric features.

Considering that I only use it in the morning – I tend to migrate to the PC Pro laboratory in the afternoons, like a goose heading South for the winter – that’s a whole lot of typing.

To reward myself I’m going to take two weeks off work and go on my first holiday since time immemorial. Bye.

It isn’t totally new – Londoners can check their borough already at the Met Police website. And a quick look at the figures shows that – despite the media giving the impression we’re entering a new Wild West of guns and knives – crime in London has been on the decline for several years now.

At the time of writing, gun-enabled crime is down 11.5% on last year; violence against the person has dropped 4.8%; murders fell by 1.9% in the last 12 months and robberies are down a massive 19%.

But according to the papers it’s crime “hot-spots” that are the problem, so a plan like these online crime maps is the ideal way to highlight it, right? Wrong, and to illustrate why, I give you an example of an existing online crime mapping scheme:

The LCPD crime “Blotter” (click to enlarge).

Before you attack me with the blindingly obvious, I know it’s not real.

The LCPD Blotter details the daily crime stats for Liberty City, Grand Theft Auto IV’s fictional locale. And, as any idiot could confidently predict, its list of “no go areas” acts entirely as a magnet for wannabe digital criminals – whether as a challenge to single-handedly lift the crime level in a listed safe area, or simply be a part of it in a known hot-spot.

Now, I’m not suggesting the real-world maps will be so stupid as to list such glorifying top-twenty charts of “no go areas” (we hope), but is it so far-fetched to imagine the statistics on easily accessible online crime maps becoming status symbols?

Will we see gangs of youths navigating to “no go” streets on their 3G iPhones to take on the current occupants for the turf? Or challenging rivals to be the street with the most knife attacks, robberies, even murders, in a month?

Could we even see flashmob-style events? A whole borough’s gang members co-ordinate online and aim to hit a target number of crimes in a week. A day. An hour. Or even a daily ratcheting of the crime total over a week – every day more crimes than the last.

With a publicly viewable achievements sheet for gangs, it’s almost as though these crimes are legitimised by statistics; a terrible merger of computer game ‘objectives’ and real-life misery. The incentive for some to prove themselves may be too great to resist.

I know, I know, I’m sure the PM knows more about this than the rest of us; I’m sure none of all that will happen and crime will start declining quicker than Internet Explorer and the French national team.

But if it all goes wrong and crime starts rising, you know it won’t be the PM who shoulders the blame. It’ll be poor old Grand Theft Auto as usual.