Do you golf? If yes, then I have a
hell of a pick for you. Big recommendation today for
GolfCard (
itunes link).
I read some interesting things about it and decided to give it a try. I was a little hesitant at $7, but it claimed to be a fully working rangefinder/scorecard combo. We were playing Elbow Springs last night at 4pm, so at 2pm I decided to take the plunge.
First you use the app to find your course of interest. It integrates with oobgolf.com so it has an existing database of over 23,000 courses (If your course of interest isn't available you can add it yourself). Once you've found the course you will be playing you simply select it and it goes into your "courses" area. You then select a new game, select the course you just added and enter player names. Hit scorecard and you are presented with the scorecard for that course, complete with yardage markers and everything. It looks like this:
Pretty self explanatory. Touch the blue area to enter not only your score for the hole, but if you hit the green in regulation, # of chips, # of puts, if you hit the fairway, which club you used, penalties etc. Those are of course completely up to you, so if you aren't a stats
freak you don't need to enter anything beyond the score.
Even as a scorecard I think it's actually worth $7. It's seamless, simple and has a nice interface. What puts the app over the top is when you touch the hole # (green boxes at the top). Took me a while to figure it out, but when you touch them it brings up a satellite image of the hole, and marks where you are currently standing. By dragging your finger around the screen you position a marker and it gives you real time feedback on how far away that marker is.
I realize courses have markers all over the place anyways, but it came in handy several times when my buddy would ask "how far away is that sandtrap?" or "how far to the bend in the dogleg?".
I was initially very skeptical that it would get the yardage correctly, so on the first three holes I walked to the 150 yard marker and gave it a test and it was pretty much perfect every time. I was floored. The guys with me were laughing because the $7 application on my phone worked in a very similar fasion to the unit that their friend had purchased a couple weeks back. The main difference of course being that he payed a couple hundred bucks for his, and has to pay a $60 annual subscription fee.
There are some downsides however. It uses google maps, so if you are playing a course out in the middle of nowhere (where google satellite imagery is often weaker) it would be a much granier image. Secondly using the gps on your phone will suck your battery dry, so I doubt it would stand up to finding the distance on every shot. I only ever used it for those times when I was in need of a yardage to something that wasn't the green, or when I was severely off track and didn't have a marker near by. The learning curve is a little steeper, but then again it does more than your average app. It took me about 15 minutes of fiddling around with it to start feeling really comfortable. Finally, it would take about 20 seconds to "find" me sometimes. Not at all a fault of the application though as it's just using the phone gps. This isn't a big wait time, but if you've got Uptight McDouchbag behind you waiting to tee off, it could annoy people. I learned that if I was going to a shot that I knew would prove difficult to read to pull out the phone and start it up while I was walking.
I hesitate to offer any more negatives because there is an instruction manual online that I haven't read yet and I think I may find some surprises in there. I'm giving it a huge 5/5 and was blown away at how useful it was. Considering the cost of competitor products, I'd even recommend it if you were just going to play a few rounds this year. Like I said, even for a scorecard I think it's worth the $7.
