AccuWeather has announced a new service for BlackBerry smartphone users.

The free service will offer day-by-day weather forecasts on the BlackBerry smartphone home screen and access to radar, extended forecasts and severe weather alerts.

"It is a push service that pushes the forecast to the BlackBerry device multiple times a day," said David Mitchell, director of wireless services at AccuWeather.com, State College, PA.

"It sits on the desktop and when you click it, it takes you to Web pages created specifically for BlackBerry phones," he said.

Users can subscribe to the AccuWeather free service directly from their BlackBerry smartphone. An icon will appear on their home screen that displays high-level weather conditions based on weather data regularly pushed to the smartphone.

When users click on the icon, they get instant access to updated and more detailed weather information including hourly forecasts, 10-day forecasts, severe weather alerts and radar images.

Recent studies have shown that weather is one of the most requested forms of content from mobile users accessing the Web.

A recent Nielsen Mobile report showed that weather was the second most popular category of mobile content, surpassed only by email. In late 2007, AccuWeather.com was rated one of the top 15 mobile brands, also by Nielsen Mobile.

BlackBerry smartphone owners are frequent users of the Web and demand excellence from their mobile experience via relevant and timely information.

AccuWeather's new service leverages the BlackBerry platform to deliver that information to users.

Users may sign up for the free subscription service by visiting http://www.accuweather.com/blackberry/push from their BlackBerry smartphone.

The service is available free to users of the BlackBerry Bold, BlackBerry Curve, BlackBerry Bold, BlackBerry Pearl, BlackBerry 8800 and BlackBerry 8700 series smartphones.

There is no advertising yet within the app, but there are links to the standard AccuWeather.com mobile Web pages.

AccuWeather expects to monetize the application in the future with something different than just typical banner ads.

"This news service gets our icon on the user's mobile desktop," Mr. Mitchell said.

"We saw significant traffic from BlackBerry phones to our mobile Web site and decided we needed a way to better the experience for this audience," he said. "BlackBerry owners are heavy Web users and so we are catering to them better with the new service."