Cool Toy for Runners!

Last February, I was invited to tag along Salomon's crew of elite runners for a week of product testing on the French Riviera just outside Marseille. During this camp, we were introduced to a new partnership between Nokia and Salomon which would serve to promote their new NSeries Phones. As a result, the Salomon Mobile Blogs were created, which allow you to keep track of this elite crew's adventures. Essentially, you could be running on your favorite trail, take a photo, write a few words, and send it off to your own blog site instantly!

Upon returning to Canada, both Jen Segger (another Canuck invitee to the proto-testing week) and I received our own Nokia N82, another version of the NSeries. Although we were told that the phone was 'on the way', it was a bit of a random experience as it arrived in an 'open' package, with unwrapped bits, cables and a euro plug-in charger!


I'm not much of a techno geek, but after a week of playing around with it, I started to appreciate the simplicity of the phone, and even more so, the 5 megapixel camera features! But the other big feature is the integrated GPS which not only provides me with the capacity to find my way around Calgary, but it can also be adapted to track your runs!

Last week I tested this feature with a run on the Highline Trail, which I first explored last fall when it was built. Although I still have to play around with a few features, the result of the tracking was really good. The Nokia software is called Sports Tracker and lets you view various runs/trails from around the world. Basically, I turned on my GPS at the Highline Trailhead, I snapped a few shots along the way, and as soon as I got home, I transferred the data into the program and VOILA! Check out my run: Highline Trail. You can play around the map display and change the view from Google Earth, with/without roads or topo view...But as I said, there's still a few kinks to workout...b/c as much as I hate to admit it, I didn't run 107km/hr on the top section of the loop!

Either way, it's another fun little toy to play around with! Check out: www.nokia.com for more info.