If you think you need some extra motivation to get fit, Samsung and Adidas think they have the answer – a mobile phone with a personal trainer built in.

The Samsung F110 miCoach, a sliderphone developed with Adidas, is designed with personal coaching right at the heart of the phone’s functionality.

The other workout must-have – a music player – is also fully integrated with the miCoach software, a sophisticated onboard voice-guided coaching system that monitors your performance and charts your progress.

Store your training data online

Other sports-orientated phones have come and gone, but the Samsung/Adidas effort is something entirely different, and more advanced than any similar systems on mainstream consumer gadgets, such as the Nike+ iPod set-up or Nokia 5500 Sport.

As well as having a dedicated user interface in the phone, the miCoach phone can sync up with the miCoach website (www.micoach.com) on a PC to record your running performances, track key data on a graph – and develop a personalised coaching regime for you, based on your fitness levels and your training goals.

This can then be downloaded into the phone’s miCoach calendar to lay down a detailed running regime – whether you’re looking just to get fit, dump some fat, or run a marathon.

The onboard system will then coach you and give you feedback during runs, based on information from the supplied heart rate monitor and stride sensor.

Impressive accessories

Aside from the personal-trainer-in-your-pocket, the debut phone for the miCoach system has a decent features line up.

It lacks high-speed 3G connectivity, relying instead on quad-band GPRS/EDGE, so doesn’t have all the latest multimedia goodies. However, it has a good quality music player onboard, which benefits from 1GB of internal memory – although there is no memory card support, so you can’t expand it further.

There’s an FM radio included, a standard 2-megapixel camera with video capture facility, and the regular run down of messaging, email and organiser functions you’d expect from a mid-priced Samsung handset.

The accessories supplied with the full miCoach kit are impressive. There’s the heart rate monitor and stride sensor, an armband phone holder, plus you get a fine set of in-ear phones with ear loops. This is far from a token effort at a sports phone…

Nice to handle

The sliderphone design of the Samsung F110 miCoach is well considered and good to handle. Available in a range of colours, including the tasteful black of our review sample, it has a textured rubber-feel casing and a large, roughened navigation pad to give it good traction for sweaty fingers.

It’s a lightweight 80g, despite average-sized dimensions of 101.5(h) x 45(w) x 14.5(d) mm, so is good to run with. Its slider keypad is neatly engineered, with number buttons large enough, and well separated with subtle grooves between rows.

The controls on the closed slider work well, too, with prominent keys for launching the miCoach workout application and music player flanking the central navigation D-pad. The phone uses a typically intuitive menu system, based on a icon-grid main menu with various sub-menu lists as you click through options.

The display on this phone is a bit disappointing. It’s a 2-inch 262K-colour TFT LCD, with 176x220 pixels resolution – less detailed than most Samsung phones at this sort of price level. You’ll notice it more with viewing images and mobile internet sites than with general menu operation.

Surprisingly, there’s only a small amount of low-key Adidas branding on the phone, with a logo below the display an on the rear.