Adidas and Samsung team up for miCoach

More than a website, MP3 player or phone, miCoach is a total coaching system that creates personalised training plans, keeps tabs on your stats, and coaches you along the way.

It's a suite of impressive sounding sports coaching services that help you:

• Find Your Level: miCoach guides you through your first run to determine your fitness level.
• Set Your Goal: miCoach gives you a range of goals that suit your fitness level, and a series of workouts to help you reach your goal.
• Get Your Plan: With the help of professional sports’ top trainers, miCoach creates a customized training plan just for you.
• Play Your Music: miCoach lets you download 4 gigs of music, and can even customize a playlist to match your stride rate.
• Start Your Run: miCoach gives you audio cues to keep you on pace and in your target heart rate zone for the duration of your run.
• Track Your Stats: miCoach tracks your pace, distance, calories, stride and heart rate to keep you and your goals on track.
• Reach Your Goal: miCoach has everything it takes to get you there. The training expertise, the personalized coaching and the music all work together.

It all sounds great. It's only available on the Samsung F110 handset which seems to have the standard things you'd expect from a phone these days - 2mb camera, mp3/4 player, 1Gb flash memory but with the added extra of the ability to keep track of your running data - heart rate, speed, distance and stride and to manage your personal miCoach programme.

The phone is currently on sale at Carphone Warehouse in the UK (and has been for about a month now it seems). In addition, Adidas is offering a £25 voucher for all new miCoach phone owners.

Is this just a marketing gimmick or a genuinely useful bit of kit? I'm a little skeptical because at the moment, it's all focussed on one single handset. If it was software that could be downloaded on to a range of handsets then I believe it would be a much longer term proposition for Adidas. I don't have any figures on how well feature-specific handsets do in the marketplace so it's hard to judge this one. If you're half-way through your contract, would you pay for a sim-free version of this handset? Or is this only something you might consider if your contract was up and this happened to be an option at the time?

Comments please, especially from any handset marketers out there or customers who have a view on this stuff. (I'm trying out disqus which I'm told is very good).