All Posts Tagged With: "gps"

As a cyclist and runner — and iPhone 3G owner — I’ve been eagerly trying out several new fitness trackers that utilize the iPhone’s built-in GPS to track the trails and routes I ride and run. Like a “real” GPS unit, they record speed, pace, distance, elevation gain and loss, and at the end of the workout send the data to a website where you can later look at a map of your route. It’s pretty cool stuff, for a phone.

The first app I tried (and one of the first introduced) was RunKeeper, for which I paid $9.99 to download from the iPhone App Store. I’ve also tried out several free competitors that do pretty much the same thing: Fitnio, Trailguru, and Path Tracker. Peruse the Health and Fitness category of the App Store, and now you’ll find even more fitness-tracking applications, some free and some that cost anywhere from 99 cents up to several dollars. It’s getting really competitive in this little segment of the iPhone apps market.

So I was interested to receive an e-mail yesterday from RunKeeper’s developer, announcing that the app is about to become free. The reason is obvious: The company wants to become a dominant player in the mobile GPS tracker space and build up a large user community. The best way to do that with so many competitors is to give away the application.

Developer Jason Jacobs of Fitness Keeper Inc. says the company will shift to a business model based on selling advertising and possibly premium paid features (to be determined). For now, “We are … foregoing short-term revenues with the hope that our community will get to massive scale.”

I wonder if this will become a trend in the mobile-phone application community? Sure, you can charge if you’ve got an application that’s unique or has very few competitors. But for segments where the phone app market gets flooded with competitors, developers may be forced into the free model.

Well, it’s certainly a nice thing for consumers. We’ll see if companies like Jacobs’ can figure out how to make money from free and survive.

I’ve been playing around with exercise/trail tracking applications for the iPhone recently. All of them are weak, though I think it’s the phone’s GPS and not the software that’s mainly to blame. I hope that some day a smart phone will replace the need to carry a stand-alone GPS unit, but we’re not there yet.

This morning I took a mountain bike ride on the Walker Ranch trail near Bouldler (CO), and I had TrailGuru.com’s iPhone application track the route. The software worked well, and when finished I uploaded the track to the TrailGuru website. Here’s it is:

Steve and Pete’s slow tour of Walker Ranch

There are several problems with the track:

1. Maximum speed: 46mph (umm, no; 20mph hour would be more like it).
2. Total ascent: 4268ft (that would have been a great workout, but the actual trail ascent is around 1750ft).
3. Distance: 8.15mi (my bike odometer and the trail map agree that it’s really 7.5mi).
4. A chunk of the map route shows as blank; that section is in the trees, where GPS didn’t work.

Also, the battery on my iPhone was nearly dead at the end of the trail.

My trusty Garmin GPS unit would have done a much better job — more accurate, and the batteries would last for a much longer ride.

It’s exciting that we’re starting to see smart phones that can work as GPS devices. But at this point the hardware isn’t up to the task even for the short ride that I did this morning, though the software is already getting pretty good.

I especially like TrailGuru, since its website collects tracks from the iPhone as well as tracks uploaded from traditional GPS units. I may still track some short rides with the iPhone, but for long ones I’ll use the Garmin. With TrailGuru, I can store everything in one place.

I’ve also tested RunKeeper, which is similar but not as full-featured as TrailGuru. RunKeeper’s big drawback is that it doesn’t track elevation gain/loss; for me that’s an essential thing. Its developers say they’ll add that soon.

It’s no fault of those app developers, but the other thing that’s a pain is that the application must be running to collect GPS data, so you can’t use the iPhone for anything else (other than to answer a call, which puts the apps on hold while you talk; and you can listen to music using the phone’s iPod functionality, as long as you launch iPod before starting the trail app). The iPhone will work better as a GPS at the point the iPhone operating system supports running more than one application at a time.

I finally succumbed to iPhone fever and got an iPhone 3G the other day. While I’ve been thinking about the expanded mobile footprint in our lives for a while, having this thing in my hands really brings the future into focus.

One big thing that the iPhone represents is the lessening of gadgets that we carry, since the phone now does so much. I used to carry my phone and an iPod when I went out for a run; now I just need the iPhone since it doubles as an iPod. I don’t need to pack a small camera if I go on a mountain bike ride; the iPhone will suffice to take snapshots. (Actually, the iPhone is better than a camera in some ways. While the resolution isn’t as good as a stand-alone camera, with the iPhone I can take a photo, have it mark my position using the built-in GPS, and send the photo to my Flickr account and/or to Twitter.)

Another gadget I sometimes carry is a Garmin handheld GPS unit, for when I want to have a map and statistical record of a trail I’m riding. But it’s kind of big and I don’t use it all the time. (And I broke it once on a mountain bike ride when it was mounted on the handlebars and I crashed.) But now I’m using a new iPhone application called RunKeeper ($9.99), which for some exercise uses replaces the Garmin. RunKeeper tracks my runs or bike rides, telling me how far I’ve traveled, what speed I’m going, average speed, and it produces a map of the route when I’m finished.

What’s very cool is that RunKeeper automatically sends my data off to its website, so when I get home and sit at my computer, I see my stats and a Google map of my route. The site stores all my runs and rides.

RunKeeper is new, and it’s not perfect. The iPhone GPS sometimes drops the signal; the software doesn’t track elevation gain/loss, which is a critical data element to any runner or cyclist. It doesn’t have the bells and whistles that a Polar heartrate monitor (yet another exercise gadget I own) has. Worst of all, it can only record about 3 hours of trail activity, because the iPhone’s battery can’t handle more; so it’s only useful for short trail adventures, not epic all-day ones.

But RunKeeper (1.0) is a good start, and I’m eager to see how it improves with future releases. The software does get us closer to the day that a phone can be a decent GPS unit. The iPhone isn’t there yet, but I’m confident it will get there soon enough.