18Birdies Golf GPS App
The 18Birdies Golf GPS app is the rare golf app that cleanly combines useful on course GPS tools with interactive and engaging social aspects. Not only can you connect with your friends, but you can also find your next round, find golf deals, track stats, and way more! I had the chance to give it a try this fall and I’ll walk you through some of the more interesting features.
Let’s Find a Course
Considering we’re entirely in the digital age, there’s no way in the world I’m going to pick up a phone or even check Google to find an individual website for anything these days. I’m that lazy and I want things immediately. The 18Birdies app has a pretty solid course booking tool that lets you sort through local courses and make tee times. They don’t seem to have every course in my area, but it’s been really easy to get my round set up at a few of my local favorites so far.
On-Course Experience
Now that you’re ready to let ‘em fly, let’s see what features 18Birdies offers up for on-course experience.
First off, you’re looking to set some goals. This particular course, Sydney Marovitz – a north-side Chicago institution – is a popular, playable 90+ year old course set only yards away from Lake Michigan. The app asks you to set some goals for the day. Today, I’d like to steal TWO birdies from this nine-holer, so off we go. You can also set up multiple scorecards for your playing partners and even your own small tournament for live tracking!
The basic hole-by-hole GPS is the most vibrant and easy to use cell phone golf GPS app I’ve seen. The layouts are colorful, detailed, and most importantly, easy to use on the course. All the vital numbers are presented nicely. Total distance is obvious, and you can easily drag and drop the cursor to get precise yardages and targets. When you get closer to the green, you zoom a bit closer and get the all important front/middle/back distances. There’s a little button you can click that tracks your “Solid Shots” and rewards you with a pretty hilarious “niiiice shot” message.
Cool Extra Features
The 18Birdies Golf GPS app is jam packed with extra features. It’s super easy to track your fairways, greens, and putts, but it also gives you info on wind, weather, and calculates some other factors to show you what your “Caddy tells you it plays like” number will be. They offer Advanced Tools like shot tracking, strokes gained, and one of the wildest things I’ve seen on a golf app – Live Coaching.
Yes, they literally have a guide where you can enter in the scenario of your shot and they give you a colorful outline of how to approach it. That’s awesome. One word of warning: even though you’ve got a ton of cool stuff to play with, enjoy your round and keep pace. I’ll yell at you if you don’t.
The “Feed” – Get Your Social Fix
18Birdies has an interesting social networking feature too. You’re able to add friends, share stats, share pics, and engage in real time. They let you create groups, follow pro players and influencers (hi, Paige!), and even the cool courses you like. It’s kind of a one stop shop and looks like a good way to get your squad together for the weekly game.
Other Stuff You Will Like
An ambitious app, the 18Birdies folks added a Groupon-like marketplace as well. In addition to finding great deals on your rounds, you can order apparel, clubs, accessories, and tons more. They’ve got a few “bucket list” travel and golf experiences you can buy as well.
In addition to all the data you can get from stat tracking, 18Birdies even has a personalized lesson plan you can set up based on your skill level. They’ve got 200+ video lessons from top instructors, so if you happen to get the wedge yips, like you know who from our site, you can study up and practice your way out of it.
Maybe the coolest feature is the Tournament setup. You can invite all your pals, setup multiple rounds, courses, and days. It’s HIGHLY customizable, so you can do shotgun or paced start times. You can set for stroke play, scrambles, best ball, even stableford. They even let you mix in handicaps and track skins. It’s outstanding – you just need friends, or strangers, that’ll hang out with you for about 4 hours. I’ve seen other companies, and even some smaller amateur tours, run similar apps, but 18Birdies is by far the best I’ve come across.
Final Thoughts – 18Birdies GPS Golf App
18Birdies has created one of the most useful, fun, and comprehensive golf apps around. In its heart, this product is a colorful and useful GPS app. You can instantly and expertly track dozens of areas in your game with the app’s diverse and accurate features. All your friends can communicate and engage easily too. With 18Birdies, you can have your entire golf experience wrapped up into this one little app if you like!
To download the app, you can click here.
