Looking to get in shape or lose some weight, well your best and most inexpensive personal trainer might be your smartphone or tablet. Hi everyone I'm Nick Barber and welcome to our fitness edition of the IDG App Review.
Our first app is a free one called RunKeeper from Fitness Keeper. It users your devices GPS to log distance traveled and elevation. While it works great for running, you can use it for a number of activities including bicycling, rowing and others. It'll announce distance and pace to you at certain intervals, even over top of the music you may have playing. There's an online component as well that lets you plan routes and review your activities. There's also a subscription version, but for most people the free version will be just fine.
Instant heart rate makes unique use of your phones flash and camera to pretty accurately tell your heart rate. This is of course useful to help you work out most efficiently. And generally a lower resting pulse could be a sign that you're in good shape.
If you're trying to lose weight, gain muscle or just stay healthy, knowing what goes in your body is key. Two apps that we'll take a quick look at will help you do just that. Fitness HD for the iPad lets you track your calorie intake, but more importantly suggests workouts complete with pictures and videos. The big fallback here is that there's no web interface. That apps weakness is MyFitnessPal's strength. Calorie counter, exercise logger, web interface and even a social component is what you'll find with this app. It's free and syncs across all mobile platforms, which really is key if you're serious about a diet. The app's food library is huge library for food is huge so you'll rarely have to put things in manually and there's even a barcode scanner that worked pretty reliably for us. A great set of features in a free app.
What's your favorite app or one that you wish you had? We want to hear from you. In the meantime here's what we heard from some smartphone lovers here in Boston.
There are so many health and fitness apps available that we'll have to revisit this category soon. If you have an app you want us to review send us an email and we'll take a look. Until next time I'm Nick Barber and happy apping.
