A few months ago I was touring Nokia’s headquarters in Espoo when I espied the Nokia N79 Active Edition. Announced around CES time, this phone combo included a heart-rate monitor and sports armband along with special software to record your distance, heart-rate, and route for each workout. The software includes a full complement of statistics and maps for your pleasure and is quite fully-featured.
The phone itself uses A-GPS to measure speed and distance and the heart-rate monitor is a Bluetooth model made by Polar. It also includes a built-in pedometer and two extra backplates so you can customize your phone. I tested it a few times over the past few weeks and came away quite impressed.
As a work-out tool this thing is perfect. My dream has always been to have a music-playing device with full workout stats recording systems built-in and the N79 fits the bill. It is compact and the armband works well and protects the phone from dirt and grime.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mCQvqUlMe4g&hl=en&fs=1&]
You can export your workouts to multiple websites including Google Earth and you can share and record your workouts for posterity. It has a built-in 5-megapixel camera with flash.
Now for the bad news. As far as I can tell the N79 Active isn’t available on Nokia’s website or any stores. It was supposed to sell for about 350 Euro which calculates to about $5 million but I haven’t been able to spot it in the wild. You can get the N79 itself for $349 or so.
Bottom Line
In general this is a great addition to the NSeries family and a great work-out tool. Here’s hoping Nokia actually starts to ship it.
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