Google Now 's built-in pedometer tracks your biking and walking miles

While you were looking for the way back home from a late Halloween bash, Google tucked a surprise inside Jelly Bean.

Google Now brings a new feature for Jelly Bean phones, the pedometer. Though there haven’t been any official mentions of the feature, you might have noticed it while checking for directions on your phone. What the pedometer does is show how much you have biked or walked over the month.

Using the GPS information of the user’s phone, the feature calculates how many miles you have walked or cycled. Google Now also splits your activities depending on the type of activity and provides a useful comparison to the previous months. We guess these comparisons will do wonders to boost your morale, if you are improving your performance, or, simply make you feel guilty if you’ve been slacking off.

Anyways, imagine the boost to location-based marketing, now that Google knows the frequency of your biking trips to the local grocery or super store. It remains to be seen how integrated this new feature will be with other location-based services and what magic can Google create for users out of this.

The pedometer feature is yet to appear in the settings of Google Now, and it seems that only some users can see it. If you can use the feature on your phones, feel free to let us know if you like it!

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