Fantastic application. Connect your mobile with the USB cable to your laptop, install driver and EasyTether program on your mobile and use your mobile as a mobile broadband internet connection while you are charging your phone!

This is a fantastic development, when I got my Android phone I missed that kind of application and there was some hacks that could be used but nothing that worked this good.

It does not require a root:ed phone, it just works. The software will soon cost a few bucks but it is well worth it if you want to be able to use your phone as a gateway to the internet.

It also uses the phones built-in firewalling capabilities protecting your laptop from attacks from the outside by filtering various protocols. You might even filter UDP ports (except DNS requests) if you like.

(links are coming)

Now there is a spotify client both for the Android and for the iPhone. The client can also sync music for offline listening. This is such great news, I can bring my playlists from spotify where me wherever I go and listen anywhere as long as there is space on my memory card everything should be dandy.

The iPhone version apparently stops playing in the background something Apple demanded it should do, but on the Android background playing works GREAT so now I can strem music while I jog and can set up the playlist on my computer at home or pretty much everywhere and then just sync it with my phone.

So now the phone not only tracks my workout times and distance using the GPS, it also plays the music to my mood and this is something I have been waiting for some time now.

Time to become a premium member, the ad-financed version of spotify does not cover the mobile version but I don’t care. 99 SEK for a month is nothing compared to the joy it is bringing…

I need a good ebook reader. I love ebooks and the idea is great, I even bought several ebooks on fictionwise, a great site for ebooks and I used to read them on my Palm III, then my Palm IV and later my Palm Tungsten device when I got it. However the Palm is such an outdated platform today and I rather not carry the Palm around any more since my mobile can handle most of the functions of the palm but there is one thing it does not have yet, and that is a decent ebook reader.

There are several text file readers and it can also do PDF but the formats offered at sites like fictionwise usually means you need something more efficient than just an ordinary text file reader, you need something that can understand iSilo format and Mobipocket and several others preferably also Microsoft LIT files and so on. There aren’t many great options out there and dedicated ebook readers are expensive these days as well as they are proprietary, not open source, large and clumsy.

I want one for the Android platform. And I want it now.

Since I got my HTC Magic phone, the second generation Android operating system from Google and a lovely phone I have worked out using two different softwares that I would like to share.

These softwares are CardioTrainer and BuddyRunner, two wonderful applications to help you run well when doing exercise. Both offer similar features and are mainly aimed at runners that want to keep statistics on their exercise and perhaps also their competitions.

The Cardio Trainer Android application

But what do they do? To make a long story short they are both personal trainers and logging instruments that can upload your running data to a web site where you can review what you have done and compare runs over time.

They are using the GPS in the phone to log your position periodically and thus can calculate your speed. They also measure the time and therefore knows at all times your speed and pace, the distance you have ran so far and in what time you did it.  If you are using earphones and listening to music on your Android mobile as you run they will muffle the music or silence it completely and announce the running data periodically.

Feature-wise they are very similar, CT offers more settings to smooth out GPS positions during a run which can be good if you get bad measurements occasionally but won’t really help much in the long run, so to speak, but after testing the two producs side-by-side I can only conclude they are very similar in the distance they measure when running. The distance on both of them is perhaps a bit on the conservative side compared to distance measured on map or with a really good outdoor GPS (Magellan eXplorist XL) which shows a slightly longer track most of the time. Not certain why this is but they seem to be on the conservative side. My 2 km track registers as 1 850 meters roughly and that is 7.5% on the conservative side.

CT has a huge disadvantage for us Europeans, the tracks it records are shown in metric units on the handheld if you set it up to do so, but on the website everything is by imperial measurements which is really sad because it is otherwise a very good application. I have written them and they are looking into developing it. In fact there’s been two new versions of CardioTrainer released recently both with some small improvements.

The Buddy Runner

BuddyRunner however has a really wonderful web site where you can see the run on a Google Maps interface, statistics on your run such as pace for each part of the run, and elevation. It is interesting to see the elevation go up and the pace time per km increase at the same time. You can compare several runs (up to three) download your running track and it keeps tracks of your records, longest, fastest and so on. Over all it is a much more developed web site than CardioTrainer has. However the application on the handheld is less sophisticated, it does not have the same filters and settings as CardioTrainer does and when it speaks to you it always abruptly pauses the music, the CardioTrainer can lower the volume but keep the music running which is better if you are trying to keep your pace to the music.

In the phone however both applications are very similar however and the settings screen also offers settings to change the announcer frequency and the contents of the announcing messages. BuddyRunner performs well int he background but CardioTrainer wants to run in the foreground, otherwise it pauses. CardioTrainer can also automatically play a certain playlist of music for you while BuddyRunner just leaves the music player alone.

Example of the website for Buddy Runner, click to check it out in reality.

Sharing your things with others is easy on the BuddyRunner, the application and webside can write RSS feeds to your Facebook, Twitter or Friendfeed site and so on, you may show your dashboard to anyone you like, they can’t manipulate it unless you log in but they can leave a comment on your run if they want to.

CardioTrainer has a secret passcode to the webside, you can not display it without this code and when you enter the code you may also remove runs and modify the content, so you would not want to post that publicly. There is also right now no integration with Facebook, Twitter and similar sites, no RSS feeds and the tracks can not be downloaded from the site.

In the end the factor that is the most deciding one for me is the website. BuddyRunner has a much better web site and I love the feature that you can download your runs in GPX format to have them displayed on Google Earth or some similar mapping software if you like. Great stuff!