Turning Your Mobile Into a Live GPS Sports Tracking Tool

I receive an interesting email yesterday evening, about a new Java app called Map My Tracks, that offers real time GPS tracking, focusing on soprts enthusiasts. The app will work with handsets that have an internal GPS unit and also to handsets that connect to an external GPS unit via Bluetooth.

Here's the press release:

Launched today, Map My Tracks is a new Java mobile application that uses GPS technology to accurately track a sportsman's position in real time, displaying useful live information including pace, time and elapsed distance. A selection of screenshots of the service in action is available at http://www.mapmytracks.com/about/screenshots.

Once back home sportsmen can replay and analyse tracks to see where performances can be improved, as well as review useful information like average speed, maximum speed and distance covered. As Map My Tracks shows the sportsman's position live on the internet, friends and relatives can watch progress from the comfort of home too.

The Map My Tracks phone application is a Java Midlet built using Sun Microsystem's Java Micro Edition (J2ME). It is intended to work on any phone which supports Java and has access to the internet. For GPS positioning the Java Bluetooth API (JSR 82) is used to support internal GPS devices, while external GPS devices are supportred by Java Location API (JSR 179).

Find out more at http://www.mapmytracks.com/

Here is a YouTube Video of Map My Tracks:



The app looks good from what I've seen in demo so far, I'm hoping to give it a try out over the next few days. There is a monthly subscription to the service, more details of which can be found on the sign up page here. There is a free option so you can give the app a try out first.