14 DAY TRIAL // Nokia announced that the Nokia Sports Tracker beta service would cease its activity starting with June 30, 2010. After two and a half years of operation, Nokia is shutting down the service to concentrate in other directions.
The reason stated by Nokia is that, "Nokia Sports Tracker beta was an experimental, specialized vertical service letting people collect, and share their physical activities and routes using their mobile devices. Nokia's strategy moving forward is to continue to deliver on the potential of this space, but through broader horizontal offerings that take advantage of our growing Ovi platform of services."
For those who have been using the service, there is good news, as they will still be able to track their workouts using a new product provided by an independent company that holds no affiliation with Nokia. The new service, operated by Sports Tracking Technologies, is currently open for pre-registrations at sports-tracker.com. The Symbian client available can be downloaded for free from the Ovi Store. Existing users of Nokia's service will be able to import their workout history from Nokia Sports Tracker to the new Sports Tracker application until August 31, 2010.
The discontinued Nokia Sports Tracker application was a GPS-based activity tracker for Symbian phones. With it, users were able to automatically add activity information such as speed, distance and time to their training diary. In addition,workouts could be stored, shared and compared with those of other users via a free web service.
The new Sports Tracker application by Sports Tracking Technologies builds on the Nokia Sports Tracker feature set, turning one's mobile phone into a fully fledged GPS sports computer. The service keeps track of everything from burned calories while running to the average cycling speed over altitude. It includes maps, time and distance calculators, a step counter, and even a heart-rate monitor when used with a compatible HR belt.
Users of Symbian S60 3rd-edition FP2 and of S60 5th-edition smartphones can download the Sports Tracker application for free from the Ovi Store.