I did a ‘maintenance ride’ today and thought I would try out a new iphone app I downloaded last night called TrackThing. I basically turned it on, put it in the small pouch on the back of the bike and took off, ibiking if you will.

{UPDATE} Since writing this post I have reviewed a number of other iphone apps.  Have a look here.

When I was done, I checked to see what kind of information I got and WOW.

This is a still a young application, and later on I will send feedback with idea’s to make it better, but this is great.  So lets break this down a bit…

First here is the ride I took from Oakland to Berkeley and back, short little 10 miler…

For those of you who know the area, there is a pretty good climb at the top of this loop climbing hwy 13.

Now lets look at TrackThing.

Pretty cool eh?  You can clearly see where I started my climb and then my decent.  What is odd though, this the delay between elevation drop and rise in speed.  Here is a close up…

How is it that I was only starting to roll past 25mph when 1/2 way down the hill? I normally hit 28-30 at about 1/3 down the hill. Course, I did not have a great ride today, so it could be correct and I just did not get rolling very well.  But I’m going to take this on another ride with around 500′ (if the iphone is correct) climb to double check. 

Something else to note in the larger image. You can see all the times I had to break hard for traffic and stop for lights. (Yea, I stop for lights).

There are other screens on this application

There are a few more, but I did not include them because they did not offer new information. I checked these reading against my bike’s computer and what do you know.. they are pretty close!  I’m not sure which I would believe more because the bikes computer does not take 0mph into account and who knows how the iphone responds to bumps, and there are points on the ride where I wish I had a mountain bike because the road is so poor.

What I did not do is keep the mapping option on because I did not know how much battery this would use.  I will on the next ride and will append to this post.

This is a free app BTW.  Its called TrackThing. Get it!