General: Mapping your tracks by your GPS cellphone

Has anyone saw this. SportyPal is a application for mapping routes.
I still don't have a gps unit, so have been using applications like this for a long time now.
The new feature with this one, that i'm seeing for the first time at these type of applications is that can be installed and used
on any type of mobile phone that has GPS in it.
And i must say that is very accurate for a phone application.

As i said i don't have a gps unit yet, so for me taking my phone with me is not a problem, well i havent crushed the phone yet so it's ok for now :-) ,
so this thing that i'm using now works pretty good, you can check my ride here if you want, to see that the accuracy is really not that bad:
http://www.sportypal.com/Workouts/Details/6556

Awesome, wish I had a phone with GPS to try this out

Okay, so I've gone to the SportyPal website to take a look around, and a few thoughts come to mind.

First off, it's designed as a phone application from the ground up, rather than a web-based service. If you don't have a GPS phone that will run the application, the web end of it does you no good. That's not a permanent dealbreaker; as time progresses, more and more cellphones will have user-accessible GPS functions built in. But most cellphones walking around the world don't have user-accessible GPS right now.

Second, at the moment, it's definitely a Europe-centric thing. All the phones approved for the Java version are Nokias, which are far more common in Europe than in North America; of the last 500 routes mapped to the site, 328 are in Europe, 105 of them in the UK.

Third, although they've made an iPhone version, Apple has not yet approved it for distribution though the App Store. Given Apple's history with approving iPhone apps, this may take a long time - or never happen at all. I'm not sure it's a good idea to advertise an iPhone version until it's available to the public; you just disappoint people. This is a big deal for me; I am a Mac guy, and an iPhone is on my shortlist of want-to-get gadgets, to replace my crappy old Motorola RAZR (which runs Java, but does not have GPS).

I'm a huge mapping fanatic. After a 25-year hiatus, I started biking again a few years ago as a health-preservation move. I want to document all the mileage I put on so I can see the results; plus, I have a huge fear of getting lost :-0 So for me, getting accurate maps and knowing where I am (both as I go, and before/after) is very important.

I've been using MapMyRide for about two years. At the time I first started looking, I thought it was the most fully-featured of the routing websites. It's primarily web-based; they have iPhone and Blackberry applications, but those have both been added within the last year.



I have a lot of gripes with MapMyRide. It is a commercial venture, so there are features that free users don't get, such as printing maps. They recently added a "follow roads" preference, which sometimes recognizes bike paths as roads, and sometimes doesn't; there's no way to find out until you attempt to map a route. MMR is really a fitness site, part of a network that includes MapMyRun and MapMyHike. As a fitness site, I think it treats the activity as something separate to your normal life. But cycling isn't just a form of exercise ("I am now going to engage in my 1-hour exercise of cycling, at which point I will resume my regular life"); it's also a form of transportation. I use my bike as my mode of transportation for almost all trips less than five miles; in the course of a day, I may rack up ten bike sessions of three miles or less each. MMR used to separate the elapsed trip time from the start/stop time for each leg; that meant that I could map out a loop from my house, stopping at various places along the way (a client, the bank, the post office, the bike store, the bakery, the grocery store - just regular errands), and yet record it all as a single trip, by recording the start/stop time for the full loop, and removing the elapsed off-the-bike time from the trip time, which keeps the speed/calorie information honest.

About 18 months ago, MMR linked the elapsed time to the start/stop time; now, if you change the elapsed time, the stop time automatically changes and vice versa. MMWhatever has a habit of periodically changing the interface for opaque reasons; I figure out a way to jigger the system to do what I want, and then they change the site and break my tricks.

This drives me nuts.

However, at this point it sorta works for me, and I'm used to it. It doesn't require a GPS handheld, so it's something I can use now. I am disappointed that SportyPal doesn't appear to have a way to import GPX files, or to get data in by any means other than a GPS cellphone; that means I couldn't export my MapMyRide routes (also Google Maps-driven) and bring them into SportyPal. But I'm willing to look at alternatives, and I'll take a closer look...once I have an iPhone (and once the iPhone app is approved) and can actually see how well it works.

Of course you can import GPX files, i have done this with files recorded before.

It works fine on mine WM phone HTC Diamond