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 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.

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.

Thank you