I mentioned the other day that I had found a little app for the iPhone called iMapMyRide. At that time, I had just used it once but it looked pretty slick. Since then, I’ve used it several other times and thought I would share my observations a little more in-depth.
- Our Saturday night walk.
Positives:
1) The application is very simple to use. Simply start it and slip the phone in your pocket and forget it until after the ride.
2) Sending routes to the internet is quick and easy. You need an existing account on MapMyRide.com, but with that out there all you do is hit the send button and nothing else is required. When I post rides from my Garmin 305, I usually end up frustrated because the MapMyRide site seems incredibly buggy and slow at times. It locks up the PC for long periods of time, and the plug-in seems to get lost after one upload. To get it back, I’ve been having to reboot. It does work better with Firefox that it does with IE, but it’s still kind of shaky in my opinion. With this, there seems to be a very seamless integration and I’ve not had any problems posting to the internet.
3) On MapMyRide, the information posted from the iPhone looks exactly like the information that can be uploaded from the Garmin.
4) If you choose to use it, there is a voice that can be set to tell you when you’ve reached 1/2 mile intervals (I think it can be set to other intervals as well). It tells you your average speed as well as current speed. I actually found this feature annoying when riding, but Pam likes it when we are using it on a walk.
Negatives:
1) The phone will go to sleep after a few minutes. Waking it automatically stops the application. If you don’t remember to restart it, you will lose the last part of your ride. This means that if you have to make or take a phone call, your ride data is at risk! Likewise, if you just want to see how far you’ve come, you will need to restart the application and resume the ride. My assumption is that this is probably more a limitation of the iPhone OS than the app.
2) The average speed calculation is based on total time, not moving time. This means that it is always calculated low if you’ve stopped for anything.
3) Using the application seems to be a battery hog, but that may be more a problem with the GPS running on the phone than the application itself. At any rate, I’m not sure the phone would stay alive long enough to complete a century.
4) Routes are uploaded as private. I want all of mine to be public, so I have to go onto the internet and change that indicator for each ride I post. There is not a way to pre-set this setting on the application.
Bottom Line:
I like it! Recognize, however, that it is not ideal for all situations. It’s certainly easier to load your routes onto MapMyRide.com than using the Garmin to load them. I won’t stop taking my Garmin because it has more features and records more information, but since I like to post my GPS tracks to blog entries, this is a quick and easy way to do so.
God bless….
TW
