Every night at 12:15 AM Pacific, Amazon gives away a free paid app through their Amazon app store. As I am usually awake at 12:15 AM Pacific, why not let you know if today’s app is useful, or just more clutter in your app drawer?
Today’s free app is C25k Pro by Guy Hoffman, which usually runs for $1.99. It’s a personal training app, putting you on a course from being a lazy lump to being able to run either five kilometers or for 30 minutes in nine weeks.
Let’s start with the good. The app doesn’t kill you. It’s assuming you have time to run three days a week and starts off nice and slow, only having you alternate between jogging for 60 seconds and walking for 90 seconds for 20 minutes. By week nine, it assumes you will be able to just jog straight through for 90 minutes. It has nice audio cues which go over the music, telling you when to switch up your pace, offering encouragement and letting you know when you’ve reached the halfway point and should turn around.
And then there’s the bad. First, it’s never going to actually tell you if you’ve run 5k or not, because there’s no GPS integration. Which also means no route tracking, which would have been nice, if battery draining. There’s no in-app ability to track your progress, other than posting something to Facebook. It’s a rather spartan looking app, which I guess isn’t really that big a deal, but I’m throwing it in here because it’s one more on the pile.
And then there’s what is maybe the biggest problem with the app — it’s not completely integrating with Music v3, at least on my phone. Which is a big deal because it’s the one that streams from Google Music. There’s a button I can click on that will take me to the player, but the play and skip buttons do not work. Which means if I hit a song that is slowing down my pace — let’s say Berlin’s Take My Breath Away (Oh, like you don’t have the soundtrack to Top Gun), I have to jump over to Music to change it. That kind of sucks.
It’s a decent personal trainer, especially if you are an out of shape lump. It’s a sub-par app.
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