SoundofMotion AlpineSport mobile app

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AlpineSport is a free app which uses your smartphone's GPS to record data from your ride including speed, altitude, distance and cadence – and allows you to publish the route on Google Maps and similar sites.

Designed for phones that use the Android operating system, it's made by SoundOfMotion, the same company that sells the VeloComputer software for Java-based mobiles which impressed us last year.

Unlike a lot of free apps, we’re pleased to say that AlpineSport is one you won’t want to delete after two minutes’ use. As the name suggests, it's aimed at alpine sports enthusiasts and has separate mountain biking, snowboarding and skiing modes.

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There are two ways to use it – either in your backpack/jersey pocket/etc or attached to your leg using a sports holster (in order to use the cadence feature).

Without doubt the best feature of AlpineSport is the ease with which you can view (a three-tap job, providing you’ve got an internet connection), publish and Tweet the route you’ve just ridden, either on your phone or your home computer.

Like VeloComputer, AlpineSport can be set to play sounds at preconfigured points – when it detects a significant drop or rise in cadence, for example. We tended to ride with this feature disabled though.

The screen on our Sony Ericsson Xperia X1 phone was very battery-hungry but with dimming mode and AlpineSport’s power saving features turned on we were able to get a good four hours out of one battery charge.

It's worth mentioning that you can’t use the phone for calls or texting while AlpineSport is running, but if anything that was a positive feature for us.