I have previously posted about fitness and health apps available for the iPhone and other smart phones (see Staying Fit while Traveling – iPhone apps and more…) as well as some of the devices available for tracking your fitness activities like Fitbit Tracker (see Staying Fit While Traveling [Redux] – Fitbit Tracker Ships Soon).
On the phone side, one of the biggest limitations for the iPhone was its inability to multitask which can obviously cause problems when trying to run a fitness app that needs to be on all the time. With the advent of iOS4, Apple’s new operating system for the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad (to be released in the fall), Apple has caught up with other mobile platforms that have had multitasking running in various guises for a while. Whether it is the Android OS, Palm’s webOS, Windows Mobile or the BlackBerry OS, all of these devices have some sort of multitasking capabilities. Apple has taken a decidedly conservative approach to this and only allows apps to save their state or run some limited types of processes in the background. While many see this as not true multitasking when compared to Android or the Palm OS (for those interested, here is a short article on multitasking from PC World that compares iOS and Android), others think it may make a lot of sense, especially in devices with limited processing power and battery capacity. In fact, I believe the next version of Windows Mobile (the current version 6.5 is to be redubbed Windows Phone Classic), Windows Phone 7, will incorporate a multitasking model that is similar to Apple’s iOS4.
To keep our readers up to date on the latest technologies, I decided to search the App store and let you know which fitness apps now take advantage of iOS4’s new multitasking capabilities. Here are the ones I found:
- RunKeeper Pro
- Abvio’s apps –
- LogYourRun’s apps –
It doesn’t look like Trailguru or MapMyFitness has released new versions of their apps to take advantage of multitasking. It would be great if fitness aficionados could chime in here with their reviews of these apps and also let us know about others they found that support multitasking. We could keep an updated list posted here for future reference.
Also, while I have your attention, it looks like the Fitbit Tracker is now shipping with only a little backlog – it must be doing well!
Photo by scriptingnews
Tags: health and fitness apps, iPhone