What is the deal with these sports electronics companies not wanting anyone to develop their products? Any Nokia Sports tracker fans remember this fiasco?

http://www.psfk.com/2009/01/nokia-n7...eart-rate.html

Polar has no interest in selling the BT heart rate monitor by itself, you can't get the N79 active in the US (at least when it was introduced you couldn't), and no one is able to explain why.

Now here's the same thing with what should be great technology that might really raise the bar, but once again a hardware company is dictating the rules. What's it matter to them what tools developers use if they're pushing units out the door? You make hardware, just like Intel, ATI and Corsair. Get over yourselves!

Maybe they hire a lot of Broadcom alumni...

They probably don't want to give the real explanation which is "Sports Tracker crashes with the bluetooth belt".

I bought this phone, the N79 Active, for my wife and without the belt, it's fine. Also, with the belt, it usually (not always) works as intended, if all you do is take a 30 min run, nothing longer. But if you're going for anything longer, say a bike ride for a few hours or a long run, it'll crash. No, really. Seriously, it will crash. We tested it quite a bit and it usually didn't crash before 20 or 30 mins into the exercise, but I'm not sure if it ever lasted a whole hour. The Sports Tracker software will hang, lose GPS connection and not get it back no matter what you do (reboot helps, great) or the whole phone will just lock up and die until you reboot it. It is not stable enough to use, this was is with latest Sports Tracker and latest N79 firmware, tested a lot. Unbelievable garbage.

I even had it replaced (the whole phone+belt) into a new one thinking that it must be just a bad device...but no, same problems. The store (verkkokauppa in Helsinki) even tried not accepting back saying that "everybody knows Nokia's GPS chips don't work", so apparently they though it was normal it would crash after half an hour. I told them in not very friendly terms to, umm, well, "something off" and take it back, and they did, so I did get a new one. My wife seemed to like phone well enough otherwise (I can't stand Symbian, have had too many of those things, never again will I look at that 1980s interface...but anyway, it was for her) but it's no good for it's intended use. Without the bluetooth belt, Sports Tracker works fine and is a decent program. With the belt, nope. Doesn't work.

So: consider yourself lucky that you "can't" buy the N79 Active. No doubt Nokia is aware of American consumers being more prone to taking broken stuff back to the store and is holding off on releasing that thing there because of these issues. It's really a terrible product, frankly. It's been out for months (early this year, I think) and still is so buggy that it's actually unuseable. So avoid at all costs. We've gotten rid of it since. Personally I use something called Cardiotrainer on my Android phone (no bluetooth belt support though) and I attached a mount to my bike for the N810, Ecoach works fine too for that and the larger screen size is nice for a bike, to be able to glance at the map easily. Of course the maddeningly long GPS fix (30 secs to a minute even with AGPS) on the N810 is rather annoying, but Ecoach was alright otherwise. I had some issues with it, map not loading etc, but I think they've been updating it. Certainly looked alright already then (early summer).

??? you must be an mechanical engineering guy as those had a rate of +60% to fail an level 1 physics examination at my university.

perimeter multiplied with your magnets count gives you distance or
diameter*Pi*counts=distance relative to time you get d*Pi*x/t=distance/time=speed with a nice program you could track acceleration too

that's basically how bulk bike computers work, you input your wheels diameter and install the hardware. and they are as precise as you measured your diameter (if you didn't just read of the tube)...

btw gps isn't that good for low speeds as the precision is most of the time within a >3m radius, the faster you go the smaller is your "measurement fault" relative to "distance traveled"
I know that you get movement recognized within the radius but moving 7m/s (bike) or doing a 20m/s (car) makes a difference
measuring or compute (for gps) your acceleration in real time needs a bit more precision then gps.

and now where I wanted to go with it!

car developers use cameras, as you be able to measure acceleration in all directions at the same time, I know that sounds awesome to program and you need to measure the exact position of the camera for precision but it's still an incredible idea, isn't it?

says who?

when taking position of single point, gps is very rough but when measuring movement and specially speed, acceleration etc it is much more accurate.

At some point, with the n810, I was using a small C app that would poll the GPS and get location information every 10 seconds.

I had a PHP script which converted those locations (combined with time) and displayed everything on a map (using GAPI). It was very rough, and extremely non-user friendly, which is why I never released it, but it worked. I could figure out which sections were the hardest for me (slowest, most stops), and what I should train (like any cyclist: climbing)

Yes, if you want to get your acceleration, you need a magnet, that being said, it's a lot of trouble, and would drain the battery pretty quickly in my opinion. It really depends on what you want to achieve...

Want to track your performance (not something you do while riding anyway, or just you get a heartrate monitor)? Then just get a low-intensity GPS tracker application, and do the processing when you're at home (or near a power source for that matter). This allows to integrate properly with mapping software that can also provide information such as elevation and climb %.

Want to see how fast you're flying through that corner? Just get a £10 speedometer, and a £80 helmet camera.

I think it would make a lot more sense if you defined clearly what you're expecting from such software. eCoach is very good place to start in order to build your thoughts.

I've seen it every time I traveled with somebody in a car. At constant speeds the speed showed in Maemo Mapper was very accurate. When accellerating you couldn't really use it.

well let me state that clear! GPS is very precise as long as you use a device that is capable of doing the calculations fast enough, my other mobile gps doesn't really give you precision! constant speed is fine but accel. is very poor as it triggers about every second or so. with 2m/s you already get a magnet triggered once per second that's just as good as my gps... with 10mph you get it triggered twice and so on... there was one with 8-16 magnets-disc for high precision, does anybody know the name (google didnt help), for alt. you need gps or a better bike computer (there are some with alt measurement and stepping frequency)

Maybe buying a cheap bluetooth headset, then connecting the headset button to the sensor, and using that is a cheap solution (cheapest headset after 5 seconds goolge was around 12,- Euro).
Ok, it is a bit tinkering, but maybe that works? Dont know if this button can be reprogrammed, not for accepting calls, but just as Pushbutton.

I was wondering, will there actually be a mounting mechanism that we could use to mount the N900 to our bikes?

Strangely, eCoach seems to have disappeared from Maemo Select since you posted this. I had hoped, as the N900 release approached, that there would be more and more applications appearing there, not less.