A big trend at the 2009 PGA Merchandise Show had to be the number of companies offering a GPS for golf. One company in particular, OnPar stood apart from the others because it was the first touchscreen GPS, similar to that found on an iPhone. I had to go checkout what was being dubbed as the iPhone of Golf GPS, with its easy intuitive touchscreen.
The OnPar has your standard GPS Rangefinder features, like distance to the targets, hole overview, etc. But none of them offer you the ability touch anywhere on the screen get your layup distance from anywhere on the course, zoom in on the target, track your location, distance, club used and stroke, and give you personalized club suggestions based on your average distances.
A feature that isn’t talked to much about, is the Statistics Screen and Golf Bag Screen. These two features are in my opinion the coolest and biggest differentiators. The Statistics screen can keep track of up to 18 rounds of golf, it can track how well you play each hole at that course, and it can give you a cumulative average over 18 rounds. The Golf Bag screen allows you to pick and choose the clubs in your bag, with a simple touch of the screen. What cool about this is that when you use your 5 Wood on your home course it will track how far you hit that club on a particular hole in the Statistics screen, but it will recommend your next club you should hit based on the data it collects as you play each round of golf. So if your on the 9th Hole and you have 160 yards to the green, OnPar will recommend the club in your bag that will get you on the green based on the statistics it has tracked. It’s like having a caddy play with you all the time and get the advice the pros get on Tour.
To load up your courses there is no software to download just connect the OnPar GPS to your computer with the supplied USB cable and sync the unit. And there are no membership fees or course map fees. Also included is a protective sleeve for the OnPar GPS.
I can’t wait for the weather to warm up in Chicago, IL so I can test out the OnPar GPS.
The OnPar GPS retails for $ 479 http://www.onpargps.com/index.php
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anyone looking for instant gratification from this unit will be disappointed. The course list is a work in progress and supposedly to get your home course loaded it is prioritized at a 10-14 business day process. I have emailed and spoken to the customer service people and while they are friendly they defend the time frame. As i said earlier golfers look for instant gratification and at nearly 500 dollars this isnt it. I would have thought prior to release they would have had more courses avaialable than they do. Additional courses requested will only be added if there is a demand for them so that being said if i am the only user of the unit and request a particular course……my guess is it wont be added. I have 30 days and i will return it to Golfsmith if the progress of course addition hasnt improved.
Hi Allen,
I’ll be receiving the OnPar GPS to review in April and I’ll bring this issue up with them. Thanks
Rob
to rob and allen I got my onpar gps from edwinn watts in jacksonville fl. and used it for 15 days I loved the device it is the best device out there but like you said I cuold only play 4 courses in my area, and I would love to keep it but after talking to the onpar staff they tell me that they had a problem with all the requested courses and got behind . well I didn;t wait I took it back to store , then I called the staff back and they tell me that they wuold like to have all courses downloaded by sept of 2009, If they have no problems. and when all the courses are downloaded I will get another one. till then I’am using a skycaddie sg5 and I hate it ,it suck compared to the onpar . onpar please get the downloads done quickly, I love this gps TJ
sorry guys this is not April fools, I really love the onpar gps , u will see what I’am talking about,when you try it TJ
TJ, I’m awaiting response from my contacts at OnPar Gps on this matter. I checked out the golf course database and noticed that not a single golf course in Chicago that I play is available for download. This would make it extremely difficult for me to review. I’ll let you all know what I find out.
Thanks
Rob
I got OnPar for Fathers Day and have had trouble from the start. I had to call help desk to get the download sequence just right. When I finally got the courses I play downloaded, I looked at my home curse and the holes are all screwed up. I called to report it and they said they will contact our pro shop and get correct info. The errors are something they should have caught – like a 500 yd par 3. They also show a hole between the 8th green and the 9th t. There is no hole the just a long cart drive. I see all the good comments so I’ll wait a couple of weeks and see if improvements are made before returning it.
Dennis,
I just got the OnPar and am having trouble downloading my courses !!! There is no error message the tech support could not help me ?? If I can;t get it to work on my home PC then it will be going back to Golf Galxy for the Garmin. Both Garmin and OnPar have an extensive list now (including Chicago area where I live )…
Seems like a natural port to the iPhone. Agree that the course database needs to be rich enough. Need to expand outside the US too.
Do you have any Canadian courses in your data banks? I will buy one if you have the British Columbia, Canada area.
Thank you
i don’t know if you have courses of china.if you have,how could i know before i buy a new onpar? thanks
I purchased a unit and returned it shortly after. I might have kept it and waited for them to fix things but as one of the most expensive golf GPSs on the market, I shouldn’t have to wait. I think it has the potential to be very good once they get their act together.
Of the 20 or so courses in my immediate area, only one was listed, thankfully my home course, and the others were “on the list”, but no one could tell me what that meant for loading — 2 weeks, 2 months or ??. Another course was listed as “21 days” and I asked from when — they didn’t have an answer. I loaded my home course and after looking at all the holes there were at least 15 bunkers missing (a couple are 30 yards long which you would think would be hard to miss), tee boxes in the wrong places, tee boxes missing, single large trees missing that are in the middle of and on the edges of fairways that are in play and good visual markers and some cart paths were noted, others not. Lakes and streams were also missing. I contacted their support to tell them there were a number of things missing. Within two days they said they had updated the course and once I resync they should be there. Very impressive I thought, but after I resynced, some where there, many were not and in one area they put in a lake when it is a dry revine. You have to wonder where they get their information from — as it isn’t very good. It almost looks like they get “pictures” of the courses, rather than using a satelite, otherwise you couldn’t miss all the items I told them about.
Onpar unit will not sync, numerous contacts with OnPar technical support was no help. The support team has little technical knowledge about the device. Lots of suggestions as to what may be causing the inability to sync, for instance, firewall, virus scanner, any type of system protection software ie. Norton 360. But, never got it working. My suggestion, while it looks like a great device, if you can’t get it working out of the box, return it asap and find a different gps. Recommening this device is out of the question.
I got the Onpar as a Christmas gift. All the courses in my area I normally play are listed. I had no problem downloading any of them. I can’t wait for the weather to break so I can take it out on the course.
in fewer than 30 days i have returned two onpar units 1) because the screen went dark and never came back on and 2) because the screen froze up and wouldn’t move. i was embarrassed on the golf course when i couldn’t change from one hole to another and never was able to make it work properly. it’s an amazing device if it would do what they say it’s suppose to do OR IF THEY COULD GUARANTEE THAT YOU COULD RETURN IT FOR AN UPGRADE WHEN THEY GET ALL THE KINKS WORKED OUT. which i think they will eventually but for right now you might as well burn a $500 bill
Okay, here’s the truth: The OnPar GPS seems like a great device with all of the features someone who is serious about their game needs to really see where their game stands, what areas are working and what areas need more attention. But, if the GPS portion fails to work, then all that extra stuff means absolutely nothing. Such was the case with my purchase and use of an OnPar device just last week.
I purchased the device just after Christmas, and it arrived New Year’s Eve. I was soooo excited to get out and play a round, but I had to wait a couple of days due to previous family/friend plans. But, I used that time to make sure the device was updated correctly, and would sync with my computer properly. I downloaded the courses that I regularly play, and I was set. January 5th, I set out for one of my favorite courses, and was really looking forward to a great day of golf. When I got my tee time and paid, I powered on the device, and walked up to the first tee, the VERY FIRST TEE. The distance was “a little” off… by about 40 yds. But, I thought that perhaps I was just used to having guessed a little long in the past, so this thing must be right. It wasn’t, and that became very obvious after my tee shot. I was behind the 150yd marker, and my OnPar told me I was 113yds from the center of the green. And, it only got worse from there.
With several holes it had distances wrong, reversed pars on other holes showing one Par 4 as a Par 3, and vice versa. On some holes the little golf ball that supposed to show my location never moved from the tee location, even as I chipped arround, or putted on, the greens. And, all this was only on the front nine. Oh yeah, and all those “really cool shot tracking and stat features” it has? Couldn’t use them at all. It couldn’t produce any meaningful data to record. I didn’t even finish the front with this thing. I turned it off before I made the turn.
When I got home, I called OnPar and, basically, what they told me was the issues that I was having with the device are related to the way they, On-Par, map the data for the individual golf courses. Meaning they simply take a satellite photo of each course, and “trace” the photos into a computer database for the device. Then the user downloads that data into their device, and heads out to the course. They never actually get any information from the courses themselves to verify that the satellite picture is showing the current layout, or to get the correct sequencing of holes. They just assume that what the photo shows is correct, and make their best guess as to the succession of holes, 1 – 18. But, if the course data isn’t mapped properly, the device simply will not work. Period. This is what the OnPar representative told me.
To me, that sent a huge red flag that the problem here, then, is two-fold: Firstly, they are basing their GPS data on just a picture that can only be as accurate as the time the image was taken. For example, I know that Google Earth has terrific high resolution satellite images of millions of locations on this planet. However, I have personally seen images from Google Earth about my own house and neighborhood that were great to look at, but, based on the images themselves, were clearly several years old. (One picture showed a car I used to own when I was in college. That was back in 1994. And, another showed a neighbor’s house that was torn down over 10 years ago.) My point is that many of the golf courses in my area have gone through renovation in recent years, and unless the satellite picture On-Par uses to trace the course has been taken since then, the data will be incorrect, and the device will be useless.
Secondly, the only way On-Par could, or would, fix this type of problem is if a user called in the problem each and every time they experienced it. At that point, again this is what On-Par told me, they would have to take the complaint and course information, send it to their Q&A department for them to research the issue, and then they would have to get another satellite picture to compare to their current one, and if they were still the same image, THEN they would contact the actual golf course to get information from them on their course, and do the data entry process all over again. After all of that was done, they would send the individual user an email to notify them to download the course data again, and see if that solved the problem. The On-Par representative told me that this process could take anywhere from several days to a few weeks, depending on their workload.
Now, if I had played 8 or 9 courses already, and then ran into this issue with this one particular course, I would be more inclined to just deal with it, and wait for the “fix.” But, this was my VERY FIRST experience with this device, and my very first experience with their customer service, and I was really not happy with them at all. Being told that every time I have a problem with the usage of this device the “fix” will take days or weeks to make, makes owning this device just not worthwhile.
This device was going to serve as a great tool for me. And, I asked the representative if it made sense to her to own a golf GPS device to track and measure yardage, that might not track and measure accurately, if at all, then only to be made to wait days or weeks before I can try it again only to see IF it works correctly at that point? She didn’t really give me a solid answer, but said that she really did understand my frustration, and that she was very sorry. She also freely admitted that I am not nearly the first or only person to have made this complaint. Apparently, this is a very common fault with On-Par.
The next day, I returned the OnPar. Because, even if they did eventually resolve this issue with this course, how many more times am I going to have to deal with this for other courses? I need something that I can count on. Again, what’s the use in having the device if it isn’t going to be reliable, or work at all? It’s very unfortunate that I had bought into such an unreliable product, and hap-hazard company. The way I feel right now is that even though the “product” itself hadn’t been found to be defective, the “process” that On-Par uses certainly is. If I had know about this before hand, there would have been no way that I would have bought this item.
Today, I’m back with SkyCaddie where I started, and never should have left in the first place.
Latest “truth” about OnPar, Its great! I read all the reviews and found that the latest reviews pump up OnPar as the best, easiest to use, and tracks the stats and club average that I was looking for. I saw old reviews that complained about not enough courses but they had all my courses in Austin. I returned my Garmin G5 I received for Christmas to it was too big, screen graphics pretty dull, too heavy, and the features I need (I still told the wife thank you for the gift
). I exchanged for the OnPar since it had a bigger screen but much thinner and lighter weight, with the club average feature and shot tracking I was looking for in a GPS.
After using it for a few rounds, I am happy to report my research led me to the right decision. Its so easy to use to just touch a ball and save your shot, distance, and the club I used to update my club averages.
Course accuracy was the same as my buddies SkyCaddie and yardage markers on the course. My online research finds that everyone uses satellite images or walks the course producing the same accuracy. It seems it depends on the quality of the QA that really determines the accuracy of the map on the GPS. One course in Austin has really weird hole layout and it was correct on my OnPar so I assume they do a pretty good QA because you probably wouldn’t be able to figure it out just looking at a map.
Critical constructive feedback is always good for companies to hear so they can make a better product. People just whining like babies online doesn’t solve anything and it puts out misleading information when other people are really just trying to get some facts about products and not what “you said” or “support said” hear say conversations.
My review are facts, positive results, only con…pre fill the scorecard with par and 2 puts so I don’t have to enter my score from zero every time….other than that Good Job OnPar! My goal is to get my game from 95 to 85 by the end of this year and feel OnPar will help me track my progress the best.
I’ll make this short, bought the device over Christmas, they had some of my local courses but not all of them. I have had the onpar for 2 months now and only one new course in my area has been addded. They seem to be more interested in adding courses over seas. Came to market way to soon!