Live Healthy: GPS tracking

Ohmigosh. I am totally in love with GPS tracking for outside workouts. Here's how it came into my life:

The Palm Treo that I had for work finally died. It seemed like it had died once before, but came back to life. I had to get a PDA and I chose the Blackberry Bold.

Not to go all mushy on you, but I really like it so far. Some things I don't like as well as Treos when they had the Palm OS, but there was very little I liked about the Treo once it had gone to Windows Mobile. I do kind of miss having a touch screen for those times when it's most convenient, but I'm adapting ;-)

As you may remember from a past post, I was very interested in Nike+ and the way you can get data from your runs when paired with an iPod. Also very interested in iPhone GPS fitness tracker apps, but no iPhone in my future.

I didn't figure there were free GPS tracker apps for the Blackberry (because there were so many prominent premium ones), but I thought I should check and see.

I found SMap and it had a few good ratings, so I downloaded it to try.

Man, do I love this app.

First used it on Sunday without a hitch. Scott graciously joined me to bike the Three River Greenway. Here's the page, including map and elevation chart that SMap created for me.

Sunday, September 13, 2009 7:14:09 AM
01 hr, 23 mins, 12 secs

12.4 mi
Rating: Easy
Viewed: 435 times
by seanmeade

Average speed:8.9 mph
Max speed: 17.9 mph
Pace: 6:42 min/mi
Altitude gain: 233.0 m
Altitude loss: 241.0 m
Altitude change: -8.0 m

Wow, it's been viewed 435 times. That's a lot. I guess mostly from posting it to Facebook.

And here's my walk/jog from last night.

28 mins, 19 secs

2.7 mi
Rating: Easy
Viewed: 7 times
by seanmeade

Average speed:5.7 mph
Max speed: 11.4 mph
Pace: 10:29 min/mi
Altitude gain: 92.0 m
Altitude loss: 99.0 m
Altitude change: -7.0 m

What makes this so fun? I'm not completely sure. I really love seeing the numbers and the way they reinforce my workout. Not only were these good workouts in themselves, but looking at the hard data encouraged me, too.

Now, I'm sure no one is going to run out and get a Blackberry Bold to run this app. That would be silly. However, if you can run it, you should really look into it. They have versions that run on the Nokia S60, Windows Mobile, iPhone and Garmin. If you don't already have any of those platforms, but if you're interested in this kind of capability, Garmin is probably the cheapest way to get in.

I was considering getting an iPod touch as my major reward for losing weight. And one of my main interests was pairing it with Nike+. But already having this capability really takes the wind out of those sails.

The company's name is Sanoodi and they describe themselves this way: 'Sanoodi's vision is to build the world's leading geo-social platform for publishing and sharing content on the web and whilst on the move.'

At this point, I can't recommend Sanoodi and Smap highly enough.

So, what do you think? Did I pique your interest at all?