Runkeeper is a running app that will work on android, iPhone and blackberry (my bad its not available on blackberry). It’s a pretty popular app and recently their pro version became free making it perhaps one of the most feature rich apps available.

How does it work?

Besides having tons of features, it’s still quite easy to use. You can pick what activity you want to do. Then just press start activity and you are done. There is one small note though, It will start the activity whether or not you have GPS signal. I often startied an activity and had to press pause really quickly and then wait until it had a good GPS signal to start my run. I found this pretty annoying.

The first time I ran with it, Runkeeper scared the hell out of me. Apparently it mentions every 5 minutes how far you have run and what your pace was. It does it in a pre-recorded (I think) voice making it sound quite nice.

One cool feature that seems to set it apart from the other running apps is that Runkeeper allows you to set up coaching. For example, you can set intervals for yourself. If you set it up for 1 min fast and 1 min slow, a voice will tell you when it is time to start your slow or fast intervals.

Settings and personalization

You can set up what is displayed on the screen while running like pace or speed. You can also customize what the lady yells at you and when. For example, you can set it to only mention the pace every mile or every 5 minutes. I noticed that while running, I stopped looking at my watch to check how far I had run and just waited for the lady to mention that I had run 5 more minutes.

Other options include posting to facebook and twitter. It also tries to upload your tracks to the Runkeeper website which is pretty good and complete. The website gives achievements called Fitness alerts. If you ran a lot this month it will mention that this is your record. This also means you get a lot of mails in the beginning since you will break a lot of your own records.

Then there is the Runkeeper elite account. I wouldn’t pay for it now, but I might consider it if I did a lot of racing. It allows people to follow your runs online while you are actually running. They can see what your pace is, what your speed is, and where you are on the map. That’s a pretty impressive feature, and I might upgrade to elite in the future so that I can share races in realtime.

Conclusion

Runkeeper provides a lot of features (some you might not need) and it keeps the app simple and easy to use. I would still recommend sportypal to the not so techy people. Anyone that knows how to handle a smartphone should give Runkeeper try. It has all the features you could possibly want and the ability to set up interval trainings which I will be using a lot in the future.

Pros

• Tons of features
• Good voice

Cons

• Not as stable as other running apps. It crashed while making an interval training.

Overall, Runkeeper is a very good and complete app and you can get it here. There’s not much wrong with it besides the issue of crashing while making a new interval training routine. Once the interval training routine is made it doesn’t crash anymore and is very useful.

note: version reviewed was 2.6.1.0