After receiving my new HTC Hero one of the first things I did was to search for an Android application that uses the built-in GPS to log where you have been. This is very useful when doing outdoor sports like hiking or mountain biking.

I quickly found My Tracks, written by a couple of Google engineers, and I must say that this application rocks. It logs your GPS track nicely and offers a couple of interesting statistics about your trip like the average moving speed and the elevation gain. Afterwards you can upload your track data to Google Maps or Google Docs and share the link via email or Twitter.

Here is a map of a mountain bike trip I did last week:

View Mountainbike in a larger map

This trip took 1h24m and logging it used approximately 20% of the battery capacity of my (fully charged) HTC Hero.

The GPS quality is clearly superior to the HTC TyTN (running Windows Mobile) that I have been using before. Showing your tracks on a map is built-in into the My Tracks application which is a lot easier than all the hoops I had to go through before.

Note: You can also use the GPS for turn-by-turn navigation. There are a couple of existing Android applications (CoPilot Live Navigation Europe and AndNav2) and TomTom has announced that Tomtom for Android is coming. However, I have not tested this functionality because my car has built-in GPS navigation.