Endomondo

Endomondo Review

by on March 16, 2011

Since it was first released in 2008 for Symbian, the Endomondo sports tracker has been literally coming on in leaps and bounds, fixing pesky glitches (including recording one T3 tester’s top speed as 426mph) and becoming a firm cross-platform fav among the more chiseled of T3 staffers.

The Endomondo app can track almost any exercise, from running and cycling to snowboarding and kitesurfing. Using your phone’s GPS, the app lets you track your progress over Google maps, recording your average speed, distance travelled and route. The app holds all this data in a handy “history” tab, with a whole host of other data uploaded to Endomondo.com for more precise analysis. Give the app your current weight and it will calculate how many calories you burned during your run/walk/kayaking session and – with an external monitor accessory – it can monitor your heart rate, too.

Slightly spookily the app will talk to you as well – there’s various coaching options, which really come into their own with the premium version (£2.99). On an urban run through central London the free app mainly told us that GPS signal has been lost, before interrupting a few seconds later to let us know all was well again. Not recommended if you’re listening to music as well.

All the data collected by the app is uploaded to the Endomondo website, where you can share your achievements (or lack thereof) with the rest of the Endomondo community, as well as share routes with other users. There’s also an option to upload to Facebook, so you can shame either your friends or yourself. The community aspect is something we like about the app – it adds an element of competition to what might otherwise be a simple tracker of personal bests. Sign-up isn’t required to use the basic tracking features of the app, but is for the online element.

The latest version of Endomondo is a big improvement on the original, offering a huge amount of functionality while being noticeably less buggy – especially for a free app. If you’ve held off trying it until now, now is the time to download.