Google Now app gets a pedometer: The first step in Google’s fitness tracking mission?

Many are speculating today whether Google is looking to stake a claim on the fitness monitoring market, since the Google Now Android application has been quietly updated this week to include walking and cycling tracking features.

Google Now is a bit like Android’s answer to Siri, it’s an app that serves up suggestions and information to you when you think you might need it and up until now has done things like showing you the weather report before you leave the house and giving you advanced warning about meetings and events.

Using the GPS features on your phone, the app can now tell you information about your cycling and waking activity too, presenting a once a month summary of your movements and telling you how far you managed to travel. Granted that kind of data is hardly very detailed, but it’s pretty cool that it can distinguish between cycling and walking (something many other apps can’t at the moment) and could well be Google’s first step in developing the app more and more to be about fitness levels and enhanced life tracking.

According to sources there’s been no official mention of the walking and cycling feature yet or Google’s plans to integrate it with other Now features.

[Via Technology Review Image via Android Authority]