Get fit with your mobile

Mobiles are an intrinsic and inseparable part of almost everybody’s life these days – forget American Express, a mobile phone is what most people will never leave the house without. Mobiles deliver vital information to us, they entertain us, and they let us communicate – but now they can even keep us fit.

There are several mobiles phones out there with features that can help you fight the flab and act as your personal training aid.

The first one up has to be the Samsung Adidas F110 MiCoach, the first phone designed specifically to be a fully fledged training aid. Having the Adidas brand as part of the title is a clue to this phone’s sporty intentions and it actually comes with a heart-rate monitor that wraps around your chest and a stride sensor that attaches to your shoes. Each connects to the phone via Bluetooth and sends its data to the training software on the phone. On the phone itself there are dedicated buttons so you get data displayed quickly and easily.

You don’t get to just view the information on the handset though – you can sync that data to a website. You can set up a training regime online and once you’ve completed your run, that information is uploaded to the website (www.micoach.com) so you can then chart your fitness progress on your desktop PC. This long term monitoring ability gives users the ability to build up a wealth of data, perfect for anyone for whom poring over graphs is a good night in. It’s impressive stuff.

With a choice of training programmes available you can optimise your workout with basic running speeds, losing weight or overall fitness. As a training phone the only thing wrong with the F110 MiCoach is that the software isn’t Mac friendly, but aside from that this is a pretty fit phone.

Sony Ericsson however isn’t letting Samsung lead the fitness pack without a chase. The clamshell W710i is a Walkman branded phone and as such its dedicated buttons are designed for controlling tunes. However, fitness fans will be focused on the fact that it also has a built-in pedometer that records every single step you take each day and using information you’ve entered such as your age, weight and how long your stride is, it can tell you exactly how far you’ve gone, and how many, or how few, calories you’ve actually burnt off.

This resets itself every day but if you’re going out for a proper run, an application will record your time, speed and distance covered.

It may not be as sophisticated as the MiCoach but if you do want to get a little more hardcore with your approach then it does store all the pedometer data in an XML file, which you can use to compare with other users around the world.

Even without doing that, with the W710's bundled wrist strap, music making abilities and pedometer you’ve got everything you need to give you the drive and motivation to lose those pounds still hanging over, literally, from Christmas. And if a slider rather than a clamshell is more your style then Sony Ericsson’s W580i, offering the same functions, may be more to your liking.

Nokia’s move into sports-based mobile technology comes in the guise of the N79 Active, a special edition of the N79 that will ship with a heart-rate monitor from manufacturer Polar, attached to a belt.

This communicates with the phone via Bluetooth and is designed to work with Nokia’s Sport Tracker software for GPS enabled S60 phones. This is a free service that enables you to share your routes and performance, so you could theoretically run the same routes and compare times with your friends. The app even lets you take geo-tagged photos to show off where you’ve been running and rcords details about the music you were listening to. It could be a great way of meeting a friend, or possibly a stalker, when out for a run. Do be careful folks.

Nokia’s attention to detail even extends to offering three different sizes of earplugs for the supplied in-ear headphones for the best fit while our running – a thoughtful touch.

Naturally, one would expect the all-mighty iPhone to have a wealth of sport related applications available for it. The most long awaited is Nike+, which as with the MiCoach captures all your training data and sends it to a website for analysis and comparison. It already works with the iPod nano, but disapointingly has yet to arrive for the iPhone. However, it’s strongly rumoured to be on the way and when it does it should enable you to upload your data straight from the phone without having to bother with you having to go to your PC, which let’s face it, after a hard run is a good thing.

While you wait for Nike+ to kick into action over here, there are alternatives such as Runkeeper, which converts your run onto Google Maps, even including elevation information so you can reminisce over those hills you defeated. Another alternative is Fitnio, which also does a great job tracking your run – for free apps, both are impressive and available from the iPhone Application.

With several options to choose from and more becoming available all the time the prospects for fitness focussed mobiles is looking healthy.

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