Nokia Sports Tracker

 

Nokia Sports Tracker is an application which comes with most of the new bunch of mobile phones from Nokia which contain GPS units. Which is almost every new mobile Nokia is releasing these days.  I used Nokia Sports Tracker, when I am capturing pictures on a trip and tag them with GPS co-ords, or when doing my routine walks (got to, reduce my mid a bit ;) ) or logging my journeys when I go on vacations. Its an incredibly beautiful applications, at least till recently at least.

I had few of my own wish lists for improving this beautiful application though.

Recently there has been a Beta of the Sports Tracker application, where Nokia has made few significant changes.

Now, the track also shows map overlay

Ability to rename the tracks.

Both the things are slightly problematic apart from occasional messing up the screen fonts.

 

1. The same maps which are used by Nokia Maps are used, but I don't think they are re-using the maps downloaded already. The screen at least says data loaded in kbs (no network activity detected like connecting to the network is observed). Its not yet clear to me if they are downloading the map while logging the track.

2. I renames few tracks, and the logs are useless I can not load the my GPS logs for those tracks. Don't use this feature you will make the data useless.

 

I agree that this is a beta release and many problems can be ironed out during subsequent releases or in patches. But, its quite simple things to have been checked before making even a beta release.

 

As a consequence of loading maps during the logging of GPS co-ordinates, the sports tracker has lost its speed. And I expect it to have a huge impact on my logging over extended periods. Some times when I am driving for 12-13 hours at a stretch, I expect it to consume all the memory, and when I loose network connection during my travel into the wilderness it might even freeze the phone.

A much bigger application, Nokia maps is more agile than Sports Tracker now. It would have been easier for Nokia to add logging feature in the map application than adding Map feature to the Logging Application.