For outdoor pursuits such as mountain biking, hiking, geo-caching or running, the ability to record and follow your tracks and gleam information such as speed, altitude and distance is ideal. The software from MotionX can do all this and more for a mere £1.79!

Compared to the top of the range products from Garmin, MotionX-GPS Sports did a remarkably good job of being able to record and track our position, as well a providing a host of additional features for next to nothing. While it does not provide traditional step-by-step route guidance as such, it does at least include a GPS/magnetic compass and various maps so you can navigate to waypoints or visually follow your tracks.

Geo-caching enthusiasts will also be pleased to see gpx file support and the ability to view GPS co-ordinates using a variety of formats such as DMS, UTM and MGRS.

You’ll find all the above encased in a well presented and functional interface, though it can be a little frustrating to master at first as there is a lot of to-ing and fro-ing going on between screens and the iPhones multi-touch controls are not fully implemented, but you can customise the interface to suite and we really liked the ability to control our iPod music and adjust backlight brightness without leaving the software.

Maps are downloaded to your phone over the air with a wide range to choose from including Bing, Google and MotionX’s own O-Road/Terrain topography maps  (the latter displaying contours at certain zoom levels). Maps did take a bit of time to come through over the EDGE network but with a 250MB cache available we took advantage of our Wi-Fi connection to download most of the maps before we set off on our journey anyway.

Additionally thanks to its gpx support we could also do a bit of pre-route planning by utilising Google Earth and GPS visualizer (the latter can also be used to display elevation profiles) to create compatible routes which we could then import -via email – to our iPhone, a brilliant feature that is a lot easier to do than it sounds!

Out on the trail we tested the app during a 2 hour bike ride and a 25 minute run. Outdoors the GPS acquisition was pretty quick and stable so we got started straight away by bringing up the basic track recorder, which also provides a handy option to take photos (photos then become waypoints and are marked on the map).

Once the record button is hit the software starts to display information automatically such as speed, time and distance or you can flip between additional screens to bring up your tracked position which is overlaid on the map (tracking was accurate), as well as gleaming altitude, bearing, compass directions or Lat/Lon position for example.

After the track/waypoint has been recorded you then have the option to save and upload the file to popular sites such as Facebook, Twitter or via email, which was brilliant! We could then visually see how we had performed on the day – thus proving useful as a basic training aid – as well as seeing the track displayed accurately (including the correct side of the path we were on) in Google Maps/Earth.

Our only gripes was that the software doesn’t automatically stop the timer when you stop, so you need to manually do this via the pause button and when you re-start it does wait for a few seconds before continuing to track your position which results in gaps appearing in your recorded tracks.

Navigating to waypoints or following tracks was not quite as quick at updating our position once we went AWOL as we would have liked either, but for the purpose of outdoor pursuits it works well.

Mind you the GPS compass option did seem to be struggling on our bike ride to maintain accurate headings, so we needed to switch to the magnetic compass at times (3Gs only) and we would have liked a message to appear on the screen notifying us when we had arrived to waypoints.

Still MotionX-GPS Sport is a great little app. We loved the track recording, import and community sharing features and despite its GPS compass not performing as well as expected for £1.79 it’s a bargain. Better still give the free version a go before you buy.

Price: £1.79
Map coverage: Worldwide
Web: iTunes

Verdict: 8/10

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