Move! Bike Computer 0

As my two or three regular readers know, I have lately been doing some work around the house. Specifically, I brought order out of the chaos that was the garage.

In the process, I uncovered my bike, built a simple repair sling, and got the machine ready for use, because the terrain in these parts is mostly flat ideal for bicycling. After my first outing, I decided it would be nice to keep some record of where I’ve been, so I downloaded two free applications from the Android Market.

I ended up choosing the Move! Bike Computer. It uses the phone’s GPS function to track your route and stats. If you don’t like to keep the GPS satellite feature turned on (and I don’t because it kills the battery and it’s creepy to automagicly tell someone else exactly where you are), it offers to turn it on when you fire it up.

It’s not perfect. The manual could use more detail and, in the example below, you will see that the “average speed” is higher than the “top speed”; I have no way of knowing whether that’s the program or a GPS anomaly. The map and distance of the route, though, were my main interests and were spot on.

I don’t need perfect and the price was right.

I had forgotten how much I like to bike.

The other application I considered (iMapMyRIDE Riding Cycling GPS) wanted me to create an account for its website or log in with an existing “social media” account. Since I won’t log in to any third party site with my Facebook account because of Facebook’s pervy internet stalking practices, I decided to log in with my Google account.

When I did, the program notified me that it wanted access to my Google contacts.

There is no reason that a bicycle GPS program would want my Google contacts other than to somehow violate my trust.

That application is now gone from my phone and I would recommend that anyone avoid it.