In the future, hitting the gym along with your iPhone-toting pals could spur competitiveness in ways unlike ever before. Apple’s mobile devices run a variety of fitness apps and third parties provide useful accessories ranging from casual jogging to some serious working out. Not content with resting on its laurels, Apple is looking to ratchet it up a notch with a new patent filing titled “Interfacing Portable Media Devices And Sports Equipment” that surfaced Thursday in the United States Trademark and Patent Office database.

It outlines new fitness technology letting you share performance data with your friends in real-time, as you are working out. Mentioning that traditional sharing through a third-party website is so last century, the filing goes on to describe immediate data sync between friends exercising on a similar equipment. Moreover, unlike Apple’s fitness center app patent or this fitness freak filing, it does not even pretend to mention Nike+. This suggests Apple could be developing its own solution that might some day augment or even replace Nike’s technology with numerous bells and whistles.

Fancy yourself working out on a treadmill next to your boss and being able to brag about your lower heart rate and blood pressure all the while covering greater distances. Heck, you could be even working out at your local gym while boss is running on a treadmill at his office in Tanzania.

Speaking of competitiveness…

Apple’s invention calls for the ability to display your performance data on the other person’s device, forcing him to run faster, jump higher, or hit harder. What’s more—participants can be in the same gym or scattered throughout facilities across the globe, as long as a Wi-Fi or cellular network connection exists to sync data. In addition, treadmills can exchange media (as depicted in the below drawing) and data from both treadmills can be displayed on each treadmill. “These treadmills may be located in the same building, or they may be located in different buildings, in different cities, or even in different continents,” said the filing, and then it continued:

The user can establish communication between the media player and the treadmill by inserting the connector insert of the treadmill into the connector receptacle of the media player. Again, the treadmill insert may be recessed for mechanical stability reasons. While the workout is underway, the treadmill can record workout data on the media player. [...] User data, prompts, and other information may be generated and displayed using either the media player or the display on the treadmill. The treadmill may also have other means of receiving input data, in this example, the touchpad. The touchpad may be a keypad or other such tactile interface, or it may be another type of data entry interface.

The patent filing was first submitted on Oct. 12, 2011 and credits, among others, Apple engineer Donald Ginsburg who heads “Apple’s Made for iPod” initiative. If you are eager to learn more, type in a patent ID 20120028761 into the USPTO search engine.

“In this example, media on one media player can be shared between the two treadmills. Also, data from both treadmills can be displayed on each treadmill, thus showing the users their respective standings in the competition”, Apple says in the filing.

Apple’s is actively marketing the iPhone as an indispensable companion for your active lifestyle and has been pushing Nike + iPod Sport Kit for ages (Apple CEO Tim Cook currently sits on Nike’s board of directors). Mind you, Apple’s healthy lifestyle promise is not just a marketing gimmick. The company is constantly enhancing its gadgets with new fitness-related features. For example, the fifth-generation iPod Nano gained a built-in pedometer that logs your steps and calories burned, letting you track the progress of your workouts through iTunes and on Nikeplus.com. As for Nike+ technology, it is now integrated into the iPhone, iPod Touch, and older iPod models as the company continues to promote it heavily on its homepage and retail stores.

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Over the weekend, an update was released that looks to improve this situation with a new single-player Tournament Mode. Here you'll take on the 9 opponents in the game one after the other, and their AI increases in difficulty as you progress. Make it through them without dying and you'll square off against Skar, the new boss character you can see in the icon above. Also, a very simplistic stat upgrade system lets you increase your character's speed, power, and technique with each subsequent win.

While the Tournament Mode is cool, it's still pretty thin. Upgrading your player is fun, but only lasts for your current tournament. A persistent profile where you could continue leveling up your player over multiple tournaments would be a neat addition. Still, the new Tournament Mode is a welcome addition, and despite being a bit shallow there's something about it that just keeps me coming back to play some more.

Beyond the Tournament Mode and new Skar character, this update also brings some improvements to the visuals, animation, physics, and menu UI. In other words, some pretty standard, but necessary, update type of stuff. It sounds like Mountain Sheep have even more plans for updating Ice Rage, and this latest update is a step in a good direction. Definitely worth checking out for some simple arcade fun, especially if you have an iPad and someone to play against.

Despite really liking Summer Sports Simulator, there were a few minor issues that detracted from the experience. With the game's first update, these have basically been taken care of. The most glaring problem with the initial release was that it lacked any sort of online high score tracking, which seemed like a big omission for such a high score-centric game like this. To rectify this, Game Center has been added with leaderboards for every event as well as a leaderboard for most gold medals earned during one play through. I've been having a ton of fun trading spots on the leaderboards with friends in JSRSSS.

The next major addition is a brand new event, the kayak slalom, and then the rest of the update consists of smaller tweaks and fixes. Controls have been improved on the iPhone, the AI has been balanced, and that weird cat that seemed to be stuck on the title screen has been fixed. Also, you can now choose from a list of actual flags and countries, rather than the weird mashup countries from the original release. See? I told you it got more realistic in this update, though I was pretty partial to the silly country names from before. Finally, you can turn on a "turbo" mode from the help screen at the main menu, which makes the entire game run at double speed. This makes an already difficult game that much more so, but it is kind of a fun feature to check out.

Another big change for Summer Sports Simulator is that the initial game is now free. Previously, it cost 99¢ which gave you 4 events and the option to unlock an additional 10 events with a $1.99 in-app purchase. It's something that we took issue with in our review, not so much because the game wasn't worth the money but more because it just seemed confusing and possibly off-putting for those who were thinking they were getting the whole game for their initial 99¢ purchase. Now, the game basically functions as a free demo with 5 events and the remaining 10 still available from within the game for $1.99.

Justin Smith's Realistic Summer Sports Simulator is the type of game that won't be for everyone. Now that the barrier of entry has been lowered to free, there's no reason not to give it a spin. It's a really fun game made even better with this latest update, especially Game Center integration.

I'd go so far as to say that Pocket League Story is the most approachable game Kairosoft has put out on iOS to date. There are a few tricks to min-maxing the game, but if you do exactly what it tells you to do you'll be fine. For the spreadsheet geeks among us it may be too straightforward, but ultimately this is the perfect game to serve as an introduction to Kairosoft's catalog, or for anyone who loves their games but gets hung up on lists of combos and other arcana.

As manager of a soccer team, you're responsible for pretty much everything your team does, right down to the strategies they use on the field. The only thing that's out of your hands is how they play in the moment, and even there you have some input.

You're given control over hiring and firing players, arguably the most important part of the game. You might love your starting team, with their bright-eyed eagerness, but they're terrible. Just atrocious. They'll get you through the first few games, but your priority is to court better talent. Think Game Dev Story's talent pool, but vaster and more costly. You can really customize your team down to the last detail.

Building your team is an ongoing process, one you'll handle alongside training your players. You earn research points both on the field and off, and you can use those to improve your players stats, build up a fan base, and unlock new content. There is a bit of a building sim tucked in as you set up training facilities, but it's really low key. Most of your time off the field will be spent managing numbers, choosing basic coaching strategies and courting players, sponsors and fans.

On the field, things get a bit weirder. Like Grand Prix Story's races, Pocket League Story's matches mostly play themselves. You pick lines and formations in advance, and basic passing technique during the game. You can also fiddle with your strategy at halftime and trigger auras here or there, but your players are mostly on their own.

So you're left spectating a lot of the time. There's a huge selection of matches and league tournaments to work through in the eight years you're given, but they all boil down to the same thing: watch as your players win or lose. Games can take three or four minutes, and Pocket League soccer just isn't that stimulating a spectator sport after a few hours.

This is a misstep, for sure, because it takes players out of that non-stop, always-something-on-the-go mentality that Game Dev Story so perfected. It's much easier to put this game down than any of Kairosoft's other titles - not that that's necessarily the worst thing for those of us with other things to do.

Whether you'll enjoy Pocket League Story depends a lot on where you're coming from. Aside from a few issues some of our forum users with older devices have run into, this is probably the cleanest Kairosoft game yet. The translation is good, the tutorial explanations are clear and nothing's left to muddling through foreign cultural references. So it's easy to get into, and lays out all the traditional sim fun in a very manageable way.

But it's also quite shallow, with neither the complexity of a proper football simulator or the depth of most of Kairosoft's other games. If the meta-game of keeping spreadsheets and consulting FAQs is your thing, give this one a pass. But if it's the first Kairosoft title you're considering or you're okay with a streamlined experience, I can recommend Pocket League Story wholeheartedly.

Pocket League Story appears to be no exception. The theme of choice this time around is soccer, or football depending on which country you hail from. You'll build up a team of players, train them, and then take on the rest of the league. You also have the ability to sell your team's own merchandise, build a gym for training, and even build your own stadium. The goal is to increase your fan base as you progress your team's abilities through competition.

It looks as though all the components are here of another solid Kairosoft simulation, especially if you're a fan of footy. We'll be digging in a lot deeper before passing final judgement on Pocket League Story, but if you're generally a fan of Kairosoft's work you probably can pretty much guess what you're getting here. You can pick it up for $2.99 which is an introductory price, and at some point it will raise up to their usual $3.99.

We'll have a full review of Pocket League Story in the near future, and until then you can check out impressions in our forums which are starting to trickle in.

Those same principles of low-fidelity visuals, unwieldy controls, and high playability carried through to his next iOS release So Long, Oregon! [$1.99], and they are ever-present in his latest bit of zaniness know as Justin Smith’s Realistic Summer Sports Simulator [99¢]. Don’t let the ironic title fool you, there is absolutely nothing realistic about Summer Sports Simulator. In fact, it’s greatest attraction is just how NOT realistic it portrays the various Olympic-style events it contains.

Your job is to pick a fictional country and compete in up to 14 events against three other fictional countries to see who can win the most gold medals. The events themselves are simplistic 2D affairs that are what you might have expected to find in an Olympics game for the Atari 2600 in the early 80s. Pretty standard retro-inspired stuff, but where things start to get really Enviro-Bear-y is in how you control your athletes.

Rather than traditional controls featuring d-pads and buttons, you’ll direct your athletes in Summer Sports Simulator with a spring attached to their bodies (and sometimes, the athletic equipment itself). So for example, to run the 100 meter dash you’ll touch the runner directly and drag him down the track by his springy attached string, over and over, as he clumsily tumbles, cartwheels, and flies towards the finish line.

I just cannot stress enough how terribly awkward this is, and yet, it totally works. Plus, it’s downright hilarious at times watching your blocky athlete stiffly flop around the screen. I’ve easily had more laugh out loud moments with Summer Sports Simulator in the past week than I have with any other game, book, or movie this past year. It’s the game I immediately gravitate to on my springboard when I know I need instant fun and a hearty chuckle, and so far it hasn’t disappointed once.

So while the simplicity and absurdity of Summer Sports Simulator come together to create a fun experience, the game does lack a sense of direction that holds it back a bit. There’s no persistent player data, so each time you start up the game you begin as a new random country. It would be cool if you could pick your own country to play as every time where it kept careful track of all your stats and high scores.

For such a high score focused game, some persistent game save tracking is essential to keep me coming back to play. On that same note, an online network like Game Center would be great to compete against the scores of other players around the world. Based on the developer’s comments in our forums, it looks like more country customization options and better high score tracking will be coming in future updates. Right now, although still incredibly fun, the entire affair feels a bit too much like a one-off arcade experience each time you play.

Finally, I’m not a huge fan of the pay model used in Summer Sports Simulator. The initial game costs 99¢ and comes with 4 events, and 10 more events can be unlocked via a $1.99 IAP. I definitely feel like the entire package is worth the $3 you’ll end up spending to get the whole thing, but with such a “love it or hate it” type of gameplay I think it would have been beneficial to let players try out those initial 4 events for free, to make sure it’s something that would suit them. Lowering the barrier of entry for a game like this is important, and I’m not so sure how many people will be willing to pay a dollar to try out what essentially feels like a set of demo events.

Despite my minor complaints though, Justin Smith’s Realistic Summer Sports Simulator is some of the most fun I’ve had with an iOS game in recent memory. It’s the perfect game to jump into and play around with in short bursts, or focus hours of your attention on trying to earn high scores. The complete lack of instructions on how to complete the events is part of its charm, as it’s actually fun to experiment with different techniques trying to find the best one for each event.

I’ve also dumped an embarrassing amount of time into playing around with the interactive torch lighting ceremony before your events begin, or the medal ceremony at the end where it rains hundreds of medals on the athletes which you can fling around the screen. There’s no gameplay benefit to these things, but they’re the type of silly little details that I love. Seriously, I can’t think of any other game that let’s you grab a jet out of the sky by its rainbow contrail and spin and flick it around to your heart’s content.

If you don’t mind dropping a dollar to see what it’s all about, Summer Sports Simulator offers a deceptive amount of depth and playability. It won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, but if it clicks for you then you likely won’t hesitate in dropping an extra couple of dollars to unlock all the events. If a couple of future updates can tighten up the experience with persistent profile saves and online scoring features, then Justin Smith’s Realistic Summer Sports Simulator will end up living a long happy life on my springboard right next to its brother Enviro-Bear 2010.