Get fit with your GPS-enabled smartphone

Inspired by the exploits of yesterday’s London Marathon runners? It’s never too early to start your training for next year – if you’re anything like us you’ll need all the time you can get. With your GPS-enabled smartphone you can get a little help along the way.

Nokia do a particularly good (and free) example of a GPS fitness app in its aptly-named Sports Tracker. This logs where you’ve been (for example, on your run or bike ride), timing your progress – as tracked by the GPS – to produce a wealth of statistics all aimed at helping improve your times and general fitness.

In fact, there’s more to Nokia’s utility than meets the eye, as there’s a facility to sync your runs/rides with a free account on the main Sports Tracker web site, for others to see where you’ve been and how you did, a nice community touch that should spur you on.

You can even take photos and videos during your exercise and these will appear at the right points on your tracklog on the web site, helping enrich the whole experience further. If you’re already into Google Earth (or similar), you can also export your exercise tracks in a variety of compatible tracklog formats.

On Windows Mobile there are several commercial applications that aim to do a similar job, start your search with ‘Spot’ and ‘MobileTracker’ from www.skylab-mobilesystems.com/en/.

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