Golf Buddy Plus - any reviews?

[bangman1977]

I notice Edwin Watts has the Golf Buddy Plus GPS system for $279. On their website they say there is no annual fee and that the unit will hold 1000 courses. Anyone out there have any experience, good or bad, with this unit?

[MEECHIN]

my buddy brought his out on the last round we played.

it sped up the round and left a lot of guess-work out of the game.

 

personally, i'm used to the laser range-finders that read exact yardage to the flags.

 

Golf Buddy is very convenient.

When wind gets in the mix, using a range-finder can be a pain.

Smaller than a range-finder, too. :clapping:

[labillyboy]

Anyone buy one of these yet?

 

The new tour model looks nice with the color display and it really holds over 1000 courses?

 

I looked over the list and it has all the tracks I play regularly... It would be nice to have a unit where I could just load all of them and forget about it. All the SC's and the Golf Guru only go up to 20 courses.

 

Their website mysteriously lacks any reference to the Tour model, but it is on TGW and other sites. It sounds like they have multiple features marked for each hole with to distance and clear distance.

 

I would really like to hear a first hand experience before buying one.

[bwhitish]

I just bought a golf buddy pro and I love it. I have played two rounds and it worked very well. It auto detected both courses before I teed off. The only thing I noticed is that on some holes with very little distance between green and next tee you might occasionally have to manually advance it to the nest hole. Okay one more bad thing is you will soon find out your drives are not quite as long as you thought. The pro had 625 preloaded courses(which vary by what part of the country you are in). It holds 1000. I live in Washington and it came preloaded with courses from Washington, Oregon, Alaska, Idaho, and Nevada. Pretty great. I also downloaded a couple of courses from the web site to see how it works and its very simple. I got two full rounds on one battery charge. My advice is get it!

Brian

[h2ohzrd]

So what's the difference between the GolfBuddy Pro and the +? Are they both WAAS enabled? If I move to another part of the country, are the course maps free or only for the region you are currently in?

[Buzzkill]

I have the Golf Buddy Pro model and it works great. I'd like to answer or clarify a view posts here. The difference between the Pro and Plus models are their size and course capacity/storage. The Plus is physically smaller and has a 1000 course capacity. The Pro & Tour models are the same size but physically larger than the Plus model and can hold 20000 courses. My Pro model came with I'm guessing 12,000 courses loaded (9083 U.S. courses, 738 England courses, 403 Japan courses & 772 Cananda courses to just name a few. There's another 22 Regions/Countries loaded in memory too but I'm trying to keep this post short). I don't think you can go wrong with any of the models but I personally would recommend the original Golf Buddy model (not the Plus model) which has a course capacity of 60 vice 1000 (Plus model) and is about the size of a pager and you should be able to get one new for $150 or less on ebay when they appear - otherwise it's $180 online at various stores. Don't get me wrong about the other models because I'm sure they're great but I don't think I'll exceed the need or play any more courses than 25 in my life time and that number is probably high. Anyway, downloading courses are easy and free. Hope this info helps some and sorry my thoughts were'nt a little better organized.

[h2ohzrd]

Well, I e-mailed the Golf Buddy folks with several questions the week before last and have yet to hear back from them. I base customer service on e-mail replies and responsiveness. Buying a Golf Guru instead. :)

[golf_fanatik]

I emailed CS at Golf Buddy and they responded in the same day. In addition, I called them and didn't take more than a couple of minutes to get to them on the phone. They responded to my questions fairly quickly.

 

I think CS at Guru is unbeatable but I was happy with the Buddy's responsiveness. I'm receiving my Golf Buddy Pro tomorrow and we'll see how it goes. At the end, I wanted a unit that had a backlight and could store more than 20 courses. The AAA battery back-up is just gravy as well as the score tracking module.

[mgr9664]

Just received golf buddy plus in time for the three day golf weekend..............unit charged up immediately and only lost one of three battery indicator bars when the rounds were finished......4.5 hours plus......distance marks were pretty much on......unit is lightweight and easy to clip on your belt or carry in your pocket....played heavily wooded tree lined course and always had at least six satellites.......i did buy used on ebay from west coast...i am in the southeast and deleted all of the west coast courses and just put the main three i play right now.....the big test will come shortly as my new home course is being remodeled and should be ready to play in the next 30-60 days......greens were remodeled and resized, some tees and bunkers were moved as well...so i will be mapping the course from scratch and will report in....overall a great tool...i was going to buy the golf guru...but the price on this unit was just too good and could not pass up....

[USAGolfer]

We bought the Golf Buddy Tour model and love it. We compared and read up on all available golf gps models and we feel we made a good choice. No annual membership fees, no additional charge for adding a new course or re-downloading a revamped course. Obviously way more courses available than anyone could ever play. But very nice to have courses in every state loaded if you like to travel and golf as we do. We have found it be very accurate to laser measured yardages at our course. Updated course mapping is added every Friday, so all you have to do to get the new courses is connect and download which is very easy. Friends at our GC have a couple of the other models and complain about accuracy in yardage and having to pay to download every course. We have had our GB about 2 months now and would buy it again.

[hacker1]

Golf buddy pro and tour were definitely on my list when I chose to purchase a gps, but I had to go with one that had the full overhead view of the entire hole layout. They look like good gps units, other than that.