The 91st PGA Championship kicked off today at Haziltine National Golf Club in Chaska, MN with one of golf’s best fields for a Major.
For the first time, use your iPhone/iPod Touch to follow the 2009 Championship live and see if Tiger Woods grabs his first major of 2009, if Padraig Harrington will repeat his 2008 championship performance, or if Phil Mickelson and others will stake their claim to the season’s crowning major.
Live Video
Watch Marquee Groups all four days of the tournament, and watch the entire field play through Hazeltine’s Par 3 holes Thursday through Sunday. The video streams very well over both 3G and Wifi with very little degradation in video quality, due to the use of Akamai’s content delivery network (CDN).
Custom Leaderboard
Search for your favorite players and add them to your custom leaderboard. Add or remove as many as you want. Change them as often as you want.
When you select a player from the leaderboard screen, you are taken to detail scorecard screen for that player where you can click on a “+” sign to add them to your custom leaderboard. A nice way and easy to track your favorite players without having to scroll or search for them in my opinion. I would have liked if the leaderboard screen could be rotated to landscape mode to take advantage of wider screen real estate.
Live Alerts
Like the other iPhone apps that were released for The Masters, U.S. Open, and Open Championship you are able to get leaderboard information, player profiles, tee times, course overview, news, etc. What sets the PGA Championship app apart from the others is that it takes advantage of the iPhone’s push notifications feature.
Receive alerts for your five favorite players, even when you’re not watching. Know when they: Begin their round, End their round, Score a Double Bogey, Score a Birdie or Eagle, and know how they score after every hole.
You can also receive breaking news alerts to know when course conditions worsen, when a club record gets broken, and more.
Setting this up is very straightforward and easy to do, just search for the five players you want to track, set the alert preferences, and that’s it. The only downside is you can’t setup individual custom alerts for each of the five players you are tracking. Otherwise the alerts work flawlessly, pushing out notifications to your phone, even if the app isn’t open. This saves you a lot of time of not having to constantly check your phone for updates and opening the app.
Trends
Another cool feature that the PGA Championship iPhone app has is its Trends screen that show you who moved furthest up the leaderboard each round, who fell the furthest, and see who had the longest birdie and bogey streaks of the day. The Birde and Bogey Streaks screen is a nice feature because it color codes the respective streak for each payer, making it easy to see at a glance what the trend is.
News, Highlights and Tips section allows you to do the following:
- Watch key highlights, round recaps, and interviews
- Replay key moments from PGA Championship history
- Read Live Reports, Daily Updates, and other key news stories
Plus these great features you’d expect, such as:
- Tee Times
- Scorecards in easy-to-read Front 9/Back 9 format
- Player Info
- Top 10 Leaderboard
- Hazeltine National Golf Club Course Overview
The Course Overview does provide a detailed description of each hole and a picture, but it lacks the video flyover for each hole that the other iPhone apps for the last three Majors had.
Is It Worth Paying For?
The biggest complaint I’ve heard from people is the $1.99 price of the iPhone/iPod Touch app, when the other iPhone apps have been free. While the Masters, U.S. Open, and Open Championship have been free, none of them offered the level of customization that PGA Championship app offers. The Live Alerts and Trends feature make it worth the $1.99 cost to download. I think if they charged only $.99 to download the app, cost would be less of an issue for some.
Overall, the PGA Championship iPhone app works well and makes a great way to follow the action when not at home or in front of a computer.
Download the 2009 PGA Championship iPhone App from iTunes for $1.99
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This app sounds too good to be true. Two bucks is nothing! This app is perfect for all the golf enthusiasts out there. Now you don’t have to be plunked in front of your tv to know what is going on!!! Great!
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