On a recent holiday daylight, I waited nervously in a pack of cyclists at a shopping mall parking lot outside Frankfurt, Germany, suited up in helmet and Lycra and waiting for the starting gun. I didn’t have a prayer of winning the bicycle race, an amateur “everyman” competition staged in conjunction with a pro event on the same day. But I did have something I’m pretty certain no one else in the peloton did: Nokia Sports Tracker.

I was examining the free software program Nokia developed for handsets equipped with global positioning, such as the N82 phone that the Finnish handset maker lent me. Shortly before the start, I fired up Sports Tracker by pushing a couple of buttons on the handset. As the tangle of several thousand cyclists pedaled carefully away from the starting area and gained speed, the software used the GPS capability to track my position, speed, and even altitude.

Precisely 2

hours, 8 minutes, and 19.6 seconds later, I rolled across the finish line. I finished in the middle of my age group by the hilly, 38-mile course — for me a good showing. But I was nearly as excited to see whether Sports Tracker had worked as advertised. Immediately I clicked “stop,” and with another push of a button, wirelessly uploaded the documents to Nokia’s Sports Tracker site [sportstracker.nokia.com].

Maps: Nokia vs. Google

Later, sitting in front of a PC, I was able to track my route on a map and even superimpose it on satellite images of the terrain. It was a fun way to relive the experience since I hadn’t taken any pictures with the N82’s 5-megapixel camera. [Photography is not a good hobby to pursue at the same duration you’re pedaling.] But whether I had, the software would have uploaded the images and embedded them on…

Orginal post by Mike

Electronic Gadgets Computers Games Gadget Gizmo Gismos Reviews Mechanical