frugalfairways.com

Free – No.

Cost – $0.99.  That’s right.  99 cents.

Trial – None.  It’s $0.99.  Just part with that hard-earned dollar.

Downloadable Courses – Yes.  Very good selection.  Thousands of courses.  I have used it on four courses so far, all of them mapped.

Course Selection – GPS Proximity or Manual Lookup.  GPS Proximity has found all courses so far with no issue.

Yardage Accuracy – Excellent on all four courses I have used it on.  The app relies on user mapping of coordinates (no army of people walking courses like SkyCaddie).

Yardages Provided – Front, middle and back of green.  A few yardages to major hazards on some holes.

Time to Fix – Excellent.  Just stop the cart and grab your phone.  By the time you swipe to unlock, you will have already gotten a fix.

Hole Diagram – Yes.  Google Maps.  Nice idea.

Other – I cannot believe that this is only $0.99.  Worth so much more.

As you may know, I’ve been on the search for a good GPS app for my Verizon Droid.  After four posts on Greenfinder, it should be painfully obvious.  Sitting around waiting for my daughter’s group lesson to finish (I’d already beaten balls for an hour), I figured I’d just search around a little more to see if there were any new apps out there.  In addition to Greenfinder, I’ve downloaded several free apps.  Unfortunately, none of them performed well enough to use (and several did not work at all).

Googling around, I saw several favorable posts on SkyDroid.  For $0.99, I figured it was worth taking a flyer on this.  And this is odd for me, because I normally won’t pay anything for an application without some sort of free trial or light version.  But the posts I was reading were just so darn good, I figured I could risk less than a buck.

The posts were correct.  This app is fantastic.  Yardages are received quickly and accurately.  You are dependent upon good mapping from end users, but so far, no issues there.  I’ve stood on several sprinklerheads (ones I know to be accurate) and I’m generally within two yards.  I have to admit that I don’t get to play new courses all that often, so I’m not too worried about hole diagrams or intermediate yardages, but you can just long-touch any part of the Google Map image to get a yardage to that point.  Some courses have intermediate yardages already marked; that’s up to whomever mapped the course.

Another great feature of the app is that it automatically advances you from hole to hole.  I have to admit, I’ve gotten more than a few incorrect yardages from Greenfinder because I forgot to advance the app to the next hole.  Oops.  SkyDroid senses when you’ve moved from one hole to the next and does a very nice job with it.

So for the time being, my search for the ultimate Android Golf GPS application is over.  I can wholeheartedly recommend this application, and I hope you’ll support the author by buying it.   If you know of another application that trumps the features of SkyDroid for a competitive price, please let me know.

Greenfinder - Android

So, is the third time a charm?  Well, not exactly.  Itinerant got back to me very quickly again with answers to my questions and an extension to my trial.  It seems that the imagery for the course I’ve been playing is very old (Sea Scape in Kitty Hawk, NC) and cannot be trusted.  I still have a few rounds left on my trial; I’ll try this on another golf course.  Stay tuned for part 4 of my review!

Greenfinder - Android

After my initial review, I sent a note to the good folks at Itinerant Software, and they were nice enough to get back to me in just a couple of hours with a new copy of Greenfinder.  I uninstalled the version and installed the version they sent to me.  In addition to a cleaner UI, the newer version gets a fix nearly immediately and provides yardages in an instant.  Unfortunately, every yardage I received was ten yards short.  After underclubbing on a few shots (which I figured was just me not hitting the ball well), I started standing on yardage markers.  Again, each yardage was ten yards short, almost to the inch.

I’ve sent another note to Itinerant; we’ll see what happens and I’ll report it here.

Greenfinder - Android

Part 2 added on April 8, 2010 at 9:00 am.

Part 3 added on April 8, 2010 at 11:00 pm.

Free – No.

Cost – $35/year.

Trial – Five Rounds.

Downloadable Courses – Yes.  Very good selection.  Thousands of courses.  The course I played (Seascape Golf Links, Kitty Hawk, NC) was mapped.

Course Selection – GPS Proximity or Manual Lookup.  GPS Proximity found Seascape with no issue.

Yardage Accuracy – Excellent, when I could get a fix.  But that was rare.

Yardages Provided – Front, middle and back of green.  A few yardages to major hazards on some holes.

Time to Fix – Horrible.  Basically unusable.  Approximately half the time I used the app, I could not get a fix.  When I could, it was generally 30 seconds – 1 minute before getting a fix.  Often, I got a fix and received yardages *after* I found a sprinklerhead and finished pacing off a distance.

Hole Diagram – No.

Other – I have been a big fan of Greenfinder for about a year now, having used it quite a bit on my old, work-issued BlackBerry 8800.  So when I saw that they had an Android version out, I snapped it up as soon as I could.  While Greenfinder does not provide many of the niceties that more advanced applications provide (like hole diagrams, detailed lay-up yardages and yardages to each and every sand trap and water hazard on the hole), it provides the thing I want most in a golf GPS app, accurate yardages to the front, center and back of the green.  And it did it well on an ancient (by tech standards) device.  Greenfinder for Android provides the same functionality, but because it took so long to get a GPS fix and give a yardage, it was basically unusable for my purposes.  I was willing to chalk this up to either bad GPS in my Droid or just a bad location for GPS satellites, but the GolfLogix application seemed to perform much better.  While GolfLogix is getting a fix inside our condo (it’s 108 from the couch I’m sitting on to the middle of the 10th green), Greenfinder just couldn’t get a fix in open sky.

Greenfinder for the BlackBerry is such a good product that I intend to get in touch with their tech support to see if I am screwing something up.  I don’t want to unfairly give them a negative review.  So please stay tuned and check back for updates.