In Software: Moves for iOS & Android (FREE, but it's not all good)

"The Best Camera Is The One That’s With You." ~ Chase Jarvis

I think that most of us smartphone owners probably heard that saying somewhere. Smartphones are amazing devices, whose computing power parallels the ones that made the second Star Wars trilogy, and cameras that are getting, to some extent, closer to professional cameras. But there is another trend that we need to bite into with these devices, the health and fitness market. We humans do not move enough. We sit too much for 8 hours a day and probably mornings and evenings too.

Smartphones have the advantage that they are always with you. Yes, you can buy Nike+ devices to attach to your shoes (...), various wristbands, and belt attachments, but the smartphone, our music player and Facebook crack all in one, is usually always there.

And so is Moves, which has been on iOS for some time now and was recently released on Android. Moves is free (I never get these business models) and tracks every kind of movement you make, as long as it's horizontal and not vertical (my climbing is not counted).

It comes with a number of features:

• it tracks running, biking, walking, and (public) transport (it's occasionally tricked by roller blading as public transport as well...)
• it uses Maps, which means that you can tell it when a destination was the gym (good!) or the McDonalds (bad!)
• it can show you distance, time, and calories burned
• it can send you daily, weekly, and monthly (?) notifications about how well you did, including new records
• I believe that it plugs in with other apps, which must be its business model, but I don't use them...

It just has one caveat, which is the new automatic updates on iOS 7. Because when you update Moves, it turns itself off. So you need to start the app again. But how do you know that Moves has been updated? You don't really, which is why I asked the developers to create custom notifications and/or just send me an email if the app is updated. Still awaiting that answer which is caveat 2: customer service must always be responsive, else it alienates users. So please join me in waking Moves up about this issue!

All that said, incredibly useful if you want to know how much you bike every day, how much you walked on your city trip, how much you ran on your weekly run, etc. It is your companion for Movement!