This, methinks, is cool

One of my facebook friends works for Nokia, and cycles a fair bit. I noticed recently that he’s started using Nokia Sportstracker, and after seeing some examples of what it could do I decided I’d try it too.

For my lunchtime ride today I started a new “workout” and set off on the bike on a quickish circuit around the suburb. Of course, there was a slight impediment to the N95 finding a GPS signal (something to do with heavy clouds…) but when it did lock on, it tracked the route, my speed, then mapped it to the terrain as well.

When I uploaded it to the website and looked at the whole thing, I noticed that they’ve integrated it quite nicely with Google Maps’ terrain feature. There’s also an option for a heart rate monitor record too, but I’m not quite sure how to get that activated. Probably need a Polar unit, I guess.

There’s also an option to upload a list of what music you listened too while on a particular “workout”. Which I’m sure is great, but just feels a little weird to me – I don’t listen to music when I ride.

A feature that I’d love to see is being able to click on the altitude profile, and have that particular point of the workout given a marker on the associated map.

Going to keep using it, for sure. I reckon it’s really cool that I can get all this without having to pay extra for some gadget to attach to my bike.

Now if only VirtualBox would figure out how to attach multi-endpoint usb devices (such as my phone) with OpenSolaris, I’d be really happy.