Winter is coming. The nights are getting darker and soon it will be time to dig out your scarf and gloves and get ready for another three months of central heating and wooly jumpers.
We've selected ten apps for the Samsung GALAXY Note 3 to get you in a wintry mood and help prepare you for chilly weather and the fun wintertime activities that will get your through until spring.
Final Countdown
Free – Get it here
If you are celebrating New Year 2014 away from the TV or a big crowd it would be good to know exactly when 2013 shuffles off into history and 2014 bounds into view. Final Countdown is an app for displaying accurate countdown timers for upcoming events, displayed in days, hours, minutes and seconds. New Year is one of the preset timers but you can set countdowns to any date you like, from birthdays to exams.
The app will run full screen but works even better as a widget which can sit on your GALAXY Note 3's home screen and tick down to Midnight. The timer widgets are customisable with different colours and backgrounds.
BBC Weather
Free – Get it here
Winter is traditionally the time for bad weather (who are we kidding, that's potentially any time in the UK) and the BBC's own weather app is one of the best around. It combines the accurate and trusted data of the Met Office with a well thought-out and clear interface, plus the rather comforting sight of the weather symbols used on BBC weather reports.
Quickly flick through the coming day's weather in multiple locations and get detailed, hour-by-hour predictions of humidity, temperature, wind speed and more to make sure you're not caught out by a winter flurry when you're dressed for drizzle.
DroidSnow
Free – Get it here
It has now become customary for Twitter users living in the UK to use the service to announce that it is snowing, using the #uksnow hashtag. The locations of people tweeting (derived from their postcodes or just from the geotag of their tweet if they turn on GPS) are collated by this handy app, giving a crowd-sourced view of where it is snowing across the United Kingdom.
You can add your own #uksnow report directly through the app, too.
EMERGENCY FLASHER HD
99p – Buy it here
No, not that kind. This Flasher is an app that could help you survive being stranded in your car. If winter delivers severe weather and the sun has gone down early again and you have a breakdown, the Emergency Flasher turns the Note 3's screen into a glowing plea for assistance.
On running EMERGENCY FLASHER HD you can choose between STOP, HELP or CAUTION as the message to be flashed on your Note 3's screen in bright, contrasting colours. Tapping the display increases the rate of flashing. Simply place your GALAXY Note 3 on your car's rear window ledge or parcel shelf and it will act as both a beacon and warning.
UK Traffic Alerts
£1.20 – Buy it here
And to find out if being stranded in your car is likely... UK Traffic Alerts will give you the instant low-down on the state of major UK roads. Using data from the Highways Agency, this app is a useful driving companion at any time of year, but more so in bad winter weather,
You can select the roads you will be driving along and see alerts for poor driving conditions, road closures or accidents ahead of you on your journey. Alerts appear as 'road signs' on the app's main page and you can select an alert to see more details and pinpoint it on Google Maps relative to your current location.
