Short of getting an expensive personal trainer, what can you do to get in shape? Get a virtual personal trainer – in the form of the Wii Fit system (http://tinyurl.com/nmoxnw), an accessory of the Nintendo Wii game console. Thanks to the Wii Fit, we have a new term – ‘wiicersize’ – referring to the interactive fitness activities and games you can play using the system. With the Wii Fit, you can box, jog, do yoga and sit-ups, or activities that help improve your internal balance, guided by a virtual “personal trainer” (they come in male and female varieties). But beware: These trainers have a sharp tongue, throwing insults at users it decides aren’t in good enough shape. Unlike personal trainers who get out of line, you can’t fire these two!

The Wii console itself, if you’re not familiar with it, allows you to interact with your TV, using a remote control to control your on screen avatar while playing games. Your game avatar does exactly what you do on this side of the screen; in tennis, for example, when you swing at the ball, your onscreen persona hits it, sending it back over the net, as in a “real” tennis match. You get the experience and activity of playing tennis without having to actually go to a tennis court. The Wii Fit takes this interactivity even further, enabling you to participate in a virtual boxing match, aerobic step activity, or strength training exercises, with the the system measuring your activity and how effective the workout is.

In the Wii Fit virtual aerobic step, for example, the system evaluates how well you did based on how you kept pace with the on-screen trainer leading the exercise. The better you “step right,” putting your feet on the Wii Balance Board accessory that comes with the Wii Fit system (which also acts as a scale, measuring weight and BMI), the higher your score. As you exercise, your on-screen personal trainer guides you, giving you helpful tips on how to do the exercise (“tighten your abs,” “really extend your legs”), as well as what are supposed to be inspiring affirmations (“while you work out, visualize your ideal body”).

Until a few months ago, Wii Fit, and Wii systems altogether, were hard to come by, but since February or so they have been in plentiful supply – meaning they’ll be easy to find if you’re traveling abroad this year (the Ben Gurion duty free stores have a good supply as well). Note that there are hundreds more activities for the Wii system itself other than workout programs – adventure, role playing, sports, music interactivity, etc. (check out the Amazon Wii game page). Also note that many “true gamers” who prefer Microsoft’s xBox or Sony’s Playstation 3 have nothing but contempt for the Wii, which they consider far inferior in graphics. But none of the competition has an interactive exercise system as sophisticated as the Wii Fit. When the system first came out last year, it sold out almost immediately (along with the Wii consoles needed to run it), and a shortage developed that extended into the early months of this year (whether it was one of those “engineered shortages” is still an open question).

Wii Fit isn’t the only virtual exercise program, but it is credited with kicking off the current craze – and it’s still by far the runaway best seller. A new exercise program by Electronic Arts that makes use of the Wii Balance Board and has workouts like the Wii Fit has gotten some good buzz online, and many users are happy with My Fitness Coach and Gold’s Gym Cardio Workout.

Wii systems cost between $250 and $350 depending on where you buy them, while the Wii Fit exercise package costs about another $100, with the balance board included. For less than $500, you get access to a “personal trainer” who will lead and inspire you to get in shape. That’s a lot cheaper than a gym membership! But is it effective? Can you lose weight or get in shape as effectively with a Wii Fit’s virtual trainer as you can with a real one?

Depends who you ask; some criticize the whole virtual exercise thing (there are now four major such packages for the Wii, with the Wii Fit by far the most popular), saying that there’s no way to prevent cheating and truly measure effectiveness without the human touch. Wii Fit advocates reply that the system is very finely and accurately tuned, and that it’s very hard to cheat it (that’s not strictly true, as this fellow demonstrates). A Mississippi scientist is currently studying the Wii Fit’s effectiveness in fighting fat, but according to these young scientists (http://tinyurl.com/mtj9dw), there is a definite benefit to interactive Wii exercise.

In the end, pros will tell you, it comes down to motivation. Now, there are two ways to motivate – positively and negatively. Personally, I find the Wii Fit’s attempts at the former annoying (although I do like it when the female trainer applauds you at the end of your workout for sticking with it). Wii Fit has plenty of negative motivation, though – to the point where some accuse it of being rude. It doesn’t shy away from calling you overweight or even obese, based on your BMI – which many say is an inaccurate way to tell who’s overweight anyway. The virtual trainers have some choice comments for those who slack off in exercises, and if you gain weight, your avatar (called a Mii) gets fatter too! Personally, I can’t think of a greater insult than being made fun of by a computer program. My first choice would be to smash the thing to pieces – but I spent too much on it. Instead, I’ll make it eat its words – by working out harder! Now that’s motivation!

You might think that I, sophisticated and worldly Newzgeek who always seems to be on top of things, would be able to count himself among the digitally privileged. But oh, how wrong you would be. Some computer folk, it is true, find their paths open and laid out before them, with no obstacles in their way. Not me; I have to work like a dog for every advance, for every innovation.

Not one to rely on glamorous press releases, I try out ideas that developers and Web sites claim are cool. Sometimes they work and sometimes they don’t – but either way, I have an experience I can share with readers to clue them in to a great idea, or warn them away from one that doesn’t work.

To wit: In my never-ending quest to cheap out and avoid buying an iPhone (it’s just a matter of time, I assure you), I’ve been busily upgrading my Sony Ericsson w710i, still a great phone for the money. It’s advantage over run- of-the-mill 3G cellphones, of course, is the built-in jogging and running software; when you run the program, the phone records the number of steps you take (walking or running), speed, distance covered, calories burnt, etc. Can the iPhone do that? Probably, but my phone is cheaper, and I have it already.

I also installed an improved video player, so the phone can also play back MP4 video format files (along with a bunch of others), just like the iPhone. As a Sony legacy product, my phone is all about being a Walkman too, and has music software that can handle playlists, searches, song identification, etc. And I upgraded the storage card (memory stick, in Sony’s world) to handle 2 GB of stuff. True, that’s half the amount of the least of the iPhones, but all that means is I have to connect my phone to a computer twice as much as an iPhone owner. Big deal.

And there’s one thing my Sony phone has over an iPhone – FM radio. Maybe it’s an internal response to the existential of modern life, but I much prefer recorded music played by a live person on the other side of a microphone to recorded music on a memory card. The iPhone doesn’t have built-in local FM radio; you have to spend an extra $50 for an add-on to get that. What you can listen to on the iPhone, however, is Internet radio, via a number of applications and Web sites that have special streams for the Apple devices.

As it happens, you can listen to Internet radio on a Sony Java phone too – at least theoretically. (This is about where the press releases and glowing statements began to diverge from the reality of things.) Unfortunately, listening to Internet radio on a Java phone isn’t easy, and it’s probably not free.

You may be wondering why I need Internet radio if I’ve got regular radio to keep me busy. Why not just listen to MP3s when I’m in the mood, and Reshet whatever when I want a live voice?

Because I want to be free. Untethered. Able to lift my head, run and jump as I please, without worrying about getting tangled up in something I might not be able to get out of so easily. And, because if an iPhone can do it, I can do it too.

For you see, the one drawback to my local cellphone radio setup is that I have to be tethered to the phone. The radio needs an antenna, and the antenna connects physically to the phone via the recharging (data) port. The connector has a microphone, a connection for a pair of earbuds or earphones, and of course the antenna. Usually I don’t mind it that much, but there are times when it’s annoying to have the wires running around the front of my body.

Avoiding wires is why people buy Bluetooth headpieces and microphones, but in this case, Bluetooth won’t allow streaming of FM radio. But I could use a Bluetooth headset to listen to streaming Internet radio. All I had to do was find a streaming Internet radio program for Java phones that would allow me to enter the URLs for my favorite stations (and upgrade my plan to allow for unlimited data connections, of course) and I was set!

So, doing my due diligence duty, I came up with no fewer than four different solutions for Java cellphone Internet radio: MFRadio (http://mfradio.sourceforge.net/), Radiobee (http:// www.radiobee.com/), Mplayer (http://tinyurl.com/32fdz8) and La Velle Mobile Radio (http://www.lavellamobile.com/). With four to choose from, I figured at least one of them would work out and I would be listening to my favorite local radio via their Internet streams, without encumbering wires. Untethered.

As you have probably figured out by now, it wasn’t that simple. I started with Mplayer (Sourceforge is always good, isn’t it?), but – nothing. The highly praised Radiobee also turned out to be useless; unable to stream a sound. The only program that worked at all, in fact, was the La Velle application.

Why did La Velle work but not the others? Apparently my SIM is somehow “locked” for the purposes of streaming Internet radio. (I couldn’t figure out exactly why, but it may be a security thing.) La Velle had a workaround for this, which allowed me to stream their stations, but the workaround didn’t fix things for the other programs.

But one program is all I need, right? Maybe, but La Velle is not going to allow me to stream the sites that I want, from what I could tell. The site has more than 130 stations streaming via their server (and you have to use their “rebroadcasting server” if you have a locked SIM card, unless you set one up yourself. I have the instructions, if you’re really interested). Plus, it’s not free; although they are running a special where you can get lifetime membership for a mere $19.97. (In this day of the puny dollar and the super-shekel, it works out to not a bad price.)

I was very tempted, but my experience with the several free stations they offered as a sample was not very encouraging; stations would drop out after a few seconds and reconnect randomly. Tweaking the buffering settings and such, as suggested by the program’s site, had no effect. After an hour or so of sincere trying, I gave it up. Still tethered after all these years, it seems.

It’s possible the La Velle program would work fine in other places; maybe we just have an anemic GPRS connection around here. (I may keep the program around for awhile to experiment with connections in different parts of the country.)

The iPhone has Wi-fi, along with GPRS, so you would be assured of a strong stream if you were within range of a Wi-fi network. (You may have a problem if the connection tries to roll over to GPRS when you get out of Wi-fi range.)

But it still doesn’t have local radio, although Apple is said to be getting read to roll out an FM-equipped iPhone. Until then, though, the standoff continues – and I must continue to plod along, tethered. Life’s tough.