Good Value for a Basic GPS Unit

The most important issue when selecting a golf GPS unit is the availability and accuracy of course data. Many of the more advanced (and more expensive) units (e.g. uPro Golf GPS by Callaway Golf and iGolf GPS Caddie II) require a much more detailed level of course data in order for you to benefit from the expense. I found that this level of data was available for none of the courses I play regularly so I decided to go for a simpler solution.



The next most important consideration is whether (and how easily) you can "map" your own points on a course. Not all of even the more expensive units allow this and while it is somewhat less likely that you will need to do so with these units I can assure you that even the best mapping data will occasionally be inaccurate or missing altogether. This can really reduce the value of a GPS unit on courses that you play frequently.



I very nearly returned the Neo because of some short-comings in this area - specifically you cannot "delete" a custom point if they provide it in their data download. This is truly a silly restriction. You can "override" an existing point by registering a different point but why not allow a simple deletion? One of the holes I downloaded had a "pre-programmed" custom point for a creek that did not exist ! Another annoyance is that while they provide the ability to define your own "names" (labels) for your custom points this must be done as part of the procedure for registering the point on the course. Creating a label is a cumbersome process which simply takes too long while actually playing a hole. It would be so much easier if you could use their "default" label to do the initial mapping on the course and then edit the label back at home after the round.



In the end I decided to keep the unit as it is mostly accurate (+/- 5 yards) it is very compact but with a legible display (even for us older folks) it is fast to start up and the battery is rechargeable with a very good life. Mainly though I kept it because the price is very reasonable.



My final comment is that you really need both a simple GPS unit like the Neo AND a simple rangefinder to get the precise distance to the pin location. If your course has large greens the pin location "indicator" for the day is usually not precise enough for the final approach shot. Maybe one day someone will come out with a combination unit !More detail ...

Garmin G5 vs Callaway uPro vs SkyCaddie SG3

I've owned a SkyCaddie SG3 for some time and weary of its annual fees glacial operating speed and pedestrian display I decided to go color. I purchased the Garmin Approach G5 but its display is very difficult to see in normal outdoor conditions. So I also purchased the Callaway uPro. I played an entire round on my home course with all three GPS units mounted on the cart. My findings:



Build quality: All three units are rugged with great fit-and-finish. The Garmin gets the nod because it's waterproof. The Callaway is water-resistant and you can purchase a watertight skin for an outrageous $24.99 to protect it further. The SkyCaddie is not recommended for use in the rain.



Size: The Callaway uPro is the smallest and thinnest about the size of an LG Chocolate phone. The SG3 is similar height and width to the uPro but much thicker and heavier. The biggest of all is the Garmin the size of an iPhone and four times as thick. It's wide heavy and not good for the pocket.



Accuracy: The three units properly mapped my home course agreeing on nearly all distances (within 6 yards of each other) and hazards.



GPS acquisition: The old-technology SG3 takes forever to acquire GPS sometimes more than five minutes. Both the Garmin and the uPro acquire satellites almost instantly. The uPro has technology that once it locks onto satellites it really keeps them. After locking on I took the unit indoors and even put it in my pants pocket. It never had to re-acquire. Advantage: uPro.



Getting courses: The Garmin wins handily. All 10000+ available courses come preloaded in its 1GB memory. No annual fees no paid memberships. The Garmin Approach G5 offered every course I cared to search. Of course your mileage may vary.



To make the most of your SkyCaddie you need to pay for an annual membership on their website and download courses individually. Some SkyCaddie memberships allow you to download as many courses as you want from all over the world...however the unit's paltry memory will only hold a few at a time. The uPro also requires that you sign up on their website (no annual memberships though). With the uPro Basic Mode (an alphanumeric color screen that resembles that of a SkyCaddie) is free for unlimited courses. For Pro Mode (the nifty aerial photography view of each course) you pay for only the courses you wish to play a la carte. Your first Pro Mode course is free.



Information: All units show distances to the front/middle/back of greens. The SG3 also shows hazards on the same screen but it doesn't give you hazard carry distances like the uPro does. The Garmin shows the entire hole including hazards. But showing the entire hole means that the illustrations of hazards are tiny as is the accompanying yardage text. Coupled with the Garmin's dim display it's pretty useless. Curiously the Garmin apparently doesn't consider trees to be obstacles so they're not represented at all on the graphical display. The uPro (in Pro Mode) shows every tree and hazard - in fact the entire hole as photographed from satellite. It's like viewing my actual course (including my house!) from above. There's absolutely nothing like it.



On the home screen both the SG3 and the uPro also give you the time of day battery strength and GPS signal strength. The Garmin gives you none of the above. You need to briefly press the power button to see the time. It also shows a battery icon but that never moved during my round.



Battery: The Garmin and SG3 both take AA batteries whether alkaline NiMh rechargeable or lithium ion. With any AA type both units easily complete at least two rounds. The uPro uses a rechargeable lithium-ion battery. Unlike SkyCaddie models that use internal lithium ion batteries which are a real horror show to replace (SkyCaddie recommends you send the unit back) the Callaway uPro battery easily drops in. Callaway says it takes three hours to charge but it didn't take me anywhere near that long. UPro battery life is 6-12 hours depending on how bright you set the display's backlight. With my display settings (see Display below) I easily completed a round with plenty to spare. As far as battery preferences go: For some constantly recharging and changing out AAs is a grind. For others recharging (and eventually re-purchasing) internal lithium-ion batteries ($27 for the uPro) is just as bad especially considering that the battery can leave you high and dry mid-round if you forget to charge it the night before. To each his own.



Display: The SG3 is monochrome so it doesn't stand a chance. Its display is dim and boring but it does give you a button on the side for a backlight. The screen sizes on the SG3 and uPro are nearly identical. The Garmin's touchscreen display is nearly iPhone-big and drop-dead gorgeous...when you're at home. Take it outside and it washes out to the point of uselessness. Worse yet to save power the display times out a few seconds after you touch it making it even dimmer. You touch the screen to wake it up but when you touch the screen the unit thinks you want to measure a distance so the measurement feature pops up. You need to hit the "Done" button to exit that. There's no way to increase the screen timeout or disable the screen dimming feature. Also since the Garmin is a touchscreen it's a massive fingerprint magnet so it only looks pretty for the first hole. The uPro wins the display contest handily with a bright and functional screen. You can play two ways: graphically (Pro Mode) showing the course via aerial photography or with big bright alphanumeric text (Basic Mode). Since golf courses have very low contrast (lots of green color and not much else) I defaulted to the Basic Mode for easy readability. For the aerial view you can always hit the Pro Mode button on the side of the unit as it's much more useful around the green. The uPro's default setting is to power-save the display after (I think) 45 seconds. Unlike the Garmin which dims its display the uPro goes blank until you hit a button which is an enormous buzzkill. Fortunately you can get around this. You can change to a longer timeout or disable standby altogether. As the uPro has a very bright display what I did was take the backlight down to 25% (from a default 70%) and disabled standby completely. I easily completed a round with plenty of battery life to spare this way. The uPro and the Garmin use a reflective LCD technology that actually makes the display brighter in direct sunlight. The uPro's version of this technology worked far better than the Garmin's. The only time the Garmin display looked remotely readable was when you aimed it directly at the sun.



Just for fun I took along my iPod Touch 2G to compare all the displays outdoors. I figured that the iPod's conventional LCD wouldn't compete with the reflective technology of the Garmin and the uPro. Wrong. The iPod destroyed both of them. It wasn't even close. So if you have an iPhone (the iPod Touch won't do GPS) you may want to look into the golf GPS apps at the App Store. If you do decide to use an iPhone just remember it won't stand up to being dropped kicked and tossed around like these three ruggedized units and it for sure ain't the least bit water-resistant.



Hole-to-Hole: The simpler SkyCaddie wins here. It automatically advances to the next hole. If there's any confusion (you're playing past the current hole for example) it'll ask you if you want to move to the next hole. If you're starting on Number 10 for example the SkyCaddie makes that selection easier as well with a grid from which you can select holes via cursor. The Callaway Auto Hole Advance is kind of a drag. If you're anywhere near the green Auto-Advance jumps to the next hole. You can't measure your 40-yard pitch to the current green. And when they say Auto they mean Auto. In Auto-Advance mode there's no way to back up to the current hole or any previous hole for that matter. The only way out is to go to either Manual Advance or Manual Advance With Prompt (it asks you to press the center button to advance). Hitting a button on each hole is tedious. The Garmin Auto-Advances sequentially but if you jump around (skipping a couple of holes to get around slow play) you need to touch the screen arrows for each hole advance.



Settings: The Garmin gives you almost nothing to customize as it is both very intelligently designed and extremely automated. It would have been nice to be able to crank the screen brightness or at least extend the timeout. Both the SG3 and the uPro give you a host of settings to mess with including screen brightness (contrast only with the SG3) hole advance preferences and much more.



Cost of ownership: The Garmin and uPro are color so they're not cheap. If you want to compare apples to apples you could go to the color SkyCaddie SG5 but be advised that the SG3 SG4 and SG5 are virtually identical in functionality screen size - basically EVERYTHING - so you're paying almost $150 more for color alone which is the cost of a whole 20-inch color TV. (My SG3 is discontinued so now I'm quoting price from the replacement SG4.) Couple that with the amazing wow factor of both the Garmin and the uPro and the top-of-the-line color SkyCaddie SG5 is a terrible deal. To the SkyCaddie's cost of ownership add their totally outrageous annual membership fees. SkyCaddie also charges ridiculous sums of money for stuff like plastic cart mounts and batteries. The Garmin wins here hands-down with all available courses preloaded into memory. No fees whatsoever! For accessories RAM Mounts makes a rock-solid relatively reasonably-priced cart mount for the Garmin. The uPro while not requiring you to pay for a membership makes you download each course. They're all free if you want to use only Basic Mode. But if you want what makes the unit famous and awesome which is Pro Mode video previews and flyovers of each hole you need to pay. If you go for a 20-course package for example that's $60. It's still cheaper for most people than SkyCaddie because there's no annual fee. And the more courses you buy the cheaper it gets per course. However uPro accessories such as cart mounts are rarely discounted and you'll pay more for their little plastic add-ons than you would pay for a complete multi-handset cordless phone system or a new DVD player.



Extras: Each unit has (or will soon have in the uPro's case) the ability to track scores and aggregate player information. I don't use any of that stuff. No amount of button-pushing or touch-screening could beat the ease and speed of marking stuff down with a pencil.



Wow Factor: The SkyCaddie is deadly dull with zero Wow Factor but highly functional. One would think the Garmin with its big beautiful touchscreen would win. However the screen is just too dim to view the image-based interface in normal outdoor lighting. The Callaway uPro with its unique video flyovers of every hole is the winner. While the flyovers may not be great outdoors (golf courses are green-on-green-on-green so there's little contrast) they're great for previewing new courses in your home before you travel. Beyond that the uPro comes with several preloaded video tutorials to help you get the most from the unit and an earbud is in the box so you can listen to the video narration. Voice Recognition to allow you to change settings holes etc. by voice command is built into the Callaway uPro and they say it'll be activated by late 2009.



Summary: Not one of these units is perfect but the Callaway uPro is the runaway winner. It's simple to use highly customizable deadly accurate super-fast and gorgeous to view. 2nd place goes to the SkyCaddie even with its monochrome screen pokey operation and 20th Century technology. The Garmin comes in last even though it's the most sophisticated intelligent beautiful automated piece made by people who really know GPS. The thing is just too dim to use outdoors.

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