Real Life testing of the N82 and the Nokia Sports Tracker: Needs some work

I’ve been using the Nokia N82 with the sports tracker combination for about 11 days now, each and every day in locations that were pretty much unknown to me. I would say the perfect setting to see how the two would fair. It was actually fellow Urbanista Diarist Ryan Gallagher’s post that inspired me to add my own thoughts on the subject. I can confirm Ryan’s findings and would like to build on it by adding my own results and opinion. Ryan pretty much describes the idea behind the Urbanista Diaries and Nokia’s Sports Tracker:” The basic idea behind this journey is that we constantly log our positions via a Nokia service and S60 application called Sports Tracker, which in theory anyway, allows you also to shoot geotagged photos and have them automatically associated to your path when you push it to the web service. For the Urbanista Diaries however they are re-purposing the SportsTracker back-end and pitching this idea of location specific way to share and tell stories.” The combination of Sports Tracker with  the N82 it’s a powerful tool, but as Ryan puts it, the system has a few kinks here and there. Pictures taken during the use of Sports Tracker are supposed to be geotagged and uploaded to the web service, but as Ryan found out this doesn’t happen when: 1) You Pause the Sports Tracker and 2) when there’s no GPS signal. He also speculates that images taken with no GPS signal acquire the last known GPS tag, basically creating two images with the dame tag, confusing the onlineservice. Personally I don’t believe this last possibility. Based on my usage here are things that I think could be improved:

1)The name needs a change: The name Sports Tracker is misleading. A new users might think that this app can only be used for sporting activities when in fact there’s a lot of room for creative usage. It wasn’t very long ago that even I thought that this could only be used for running, cycling or other sporting activities. When I was informed of the Nseries Urbanista Diaries I thought that they would use a modified version of the app, when in fact the app was already equipped to perform other creative uses. Names like Nokia Tracking, Nokia Locater or Nokia Radar would be more appropriate. I’m not saying that Nokia should use these specific names, what I’m saying is that the name should not imply that this can be used for sports activities alone.

2)Better handling of images without a GPS-tag: While using the Nokia Sports Tracker I encountered lot of problems just from the fact that in some cases I didn’t get a GPS signal. To give you an example, when I was in some of these buildings in Las Vegas I just couldn’t get a GPS signal and right at these locations there were many picture taking opportunities. Due to the lack of a GPS signal Sports Tracker decides not to upload pictures at all to the online service, why?  In my opinion the best way to deal with this would be to do a rough estimation based on the GPS location before the signal is lost and the location after the GPS signal is regained. For example: If the phone had a GPS signal at location A, then loses the GPS signal and regains it back at location B, it should place picture on the map in the general area between A and B. In the end ALL pictures should go up!

Online Web Service

3) Pictures should be available in their original sizes: This one speaks for itself. Current Nseries devices are multi-megapixel beast, so why limit the uploaded images to 640x480. Sure, in some cases it would be best to limit the size, but the important thing is that users should have the option of choosing the size.

4)Should work with popular Web services: It’s a fact that people love online image services like Flickr and it doesn’t seem like this is going to change anytime soon. The Nokia Sports Tracker should not compete, but rather work with these online services. The idea is that in this Web 2.0 world ideally each and every service should work with and aid each other. Flickr stores your pictures and Sports Tracker helps you keep track of where you’ve taken the image.

5) Video and sounds should become part of the service: As higher speed become more accessible and as devices become more powerfull, the service should be able to handle video and sounds. Wouldn’t it be cool if you can see where you’ve taken a video or recorded a sound. Why limit yourself to only images?

6) Uploading of multiple Workouts: Currently I have to go into the Training Dairy and select each workout individually and then upload it to the internet service. Why not give you the ability to upload multiple workouts at once?

7) Give the option of dropping the Flash interface of online service: The online service looks good, but the heavy flash interface is a burden on slower devices like the N800 or slow internet connections. As a service created by and for mobile devices, why should it not work with Nseries devices.

8)Show which workouts have images: When you go into the Dashboard and view the summary of all the workouts I can’t tell which has images attached or not. I should be able to tell from the summary which workouts have included images.

What would change or add to the Sports Tracker?

Comments

[Alexandr3]

Hi Devin.

The instructions shuould be easier too. I think it's really complicated to understand what to do with this app. I have to dig a lot to understand it in its full potential. I think that could be worked too!

Cheers

[Chris P]

I am training for the Paris Marathon and have been using it for a while now:

1.Unregistered users should be able to view your profile. At the moment I can only show my friends by workouts if they are on my computer or have my login details - why cant my profile/runs be available (if I choose) to everyone??

2. Groups groups groups. Why dont these exist? If they want to create a sense of community (which they seem to want to) why is the only way to interact posting acommenst on specific peoples runs? Why cant groups be created - enabling you to create/join a group, say a marathon group or a 10k group. - In there people should be able to post messages, create 'challenges' etc. This would give community. Also it would allow people to use the 'virtual' race function that is built into sportstracker against other people rather than yourself.

3. The tracker graphs should be viewable on a day to day basis so you can compare specific runs. At the moment it only give you a weekly or monthly option - who compares how much they run on a weekly/monthly basis!? There si a lack of thinking about this here.