As you may have noticed, this year I am focusing on doing exercise more often, and I intend to run a Marathon this year. This is something I have always wanted to do, but never did due to lack of self-discipline… Now that my mother has passed away (she was killed in a car crash recently), I want to achieve this goal to remember her (she was an athlete when she was young) and as a means of self treatment as well (Forrest Gump, anyone?).

In order to track my progress, I have been using a program for Windows Mobile called Marathon. It logs GPS data fetched from the mobile device, and then it gives you a lot of information, like current and average speed, a preview of the track, distance ran, calories burned (estimated, of course). It also has a feature called Announcements, where it tells you this information on a specified interval (time or distance, take your pick). This is very nice, as I am used to listening to music while I run, and I don’t want to take the phone out of the arm band just to look at the information. You can also set a goal and it will tell you how far behind or ahead of it you are.

Once finished, you can save the activity, and share the information via the program’s website (example), tweet a summary of it, or export it (this is useful as you can import the data into Google Earth or tracking services like Runmap.net or Garmin Connect and then publish to Facebook from them).

The only issue I have found so far is that my Omnia sometimes gets very bad GPS reception and the results get a bit distorted, but I think this is something due to the device itself more than the program’s fault, though.  So far, the only solution I have found is to get a better GPS receiver (and get the heart monitored along the way).

Lastly, Marathon comes in several languages, including Spanish! (I made the translations, BTW ). If you happen to know a language that Marathon does not support, you can do the translations in exchange for a free build (yes, it’s not free, but you can periodically download the latest beta bits, so it is not a big issue).

• Phone Part: Latest ROM from the official Samsung Omnia Firmware update site.
• PDA Part: One of the latest ROMs at xda-developers forum (shokka9 custom ROMs). This ROM in particular gives the Omnia an HTC look with Manila2D interface, and updates Windows Mobile to 6.5.

Here are several screenshots that illustrate the final interface:

Please stay tuned for further updates!

1. If you have not already have done so, create a GPRS profile on your mobile with the following characteristics:
   • Name: wapANCEL (you can change this if you want, but take it into account when I refer to it later in the post)
   • APN: wap
   • Proxy type: HTTP
   • Proxy: 200.40.246.2
   • Port: 3128
   • All other settings: blank

   The proxy might be optional, but take it into account when you use your browser.

2. Connect your mobile to your PC using Bluetooth, Infrared, etc.
3. Run the +CGDCONT? command on your modem. On Windows, this can be done by going to Control Panel / Phone and Modem Options / Modems, then select your Mobile’s modem (if it’s not there, add it first), then go to Properties / Diagnostics / Query modem. Then click on the “View Log” button. A Notepad window should appear like this:

   

   Notice the two lines highlighted. The first one says that wapANCEL is the wap profile number 6, and the other line is a special line we will use in the next step.

4. Still on the Modem Properties Window, go to Additional parameters / Additional initialization string and add:
   • AT+CGDCONT=6,”IP”,”wap”,”0.0.0.0″,1,1 (note that the string after AT is the special line I highlighted before, change the semi-colon for an equals though!). This tells the modem to use the wap APN, use the IP assigned from the server, and use compression.
5. Now, create a new network connection with the following characteristics:
   • Phone number: *99***X# (X is the number of the wap profile you created, in this case, as the wapANCEL profile is the profile number 6, the number would be *99***6#). UPDATE: You can dial *99# to use the default wap profile.
6. Connect to the internet using your mobile’s network connection.
7. Configure your browser to use the HTTP Proxy defined on step 1 (200.40.246.2, port 3128)
8. Enjoy

One last thing, the proxy only allows HTTP and HTTPS traffic, if you want to use POP3 or other protocols you will need the data transfer plan, which does not have those restrictions but is more expensive.