iGolfWiz

Four!!!  iGolfWiz by 1stWorks Corp is a handy little golf tool that’ll help you determine your distance from the pin, make club selections, and take the guesswork out of reading greens.  That’s right, iGolfWiz is three handy golf tools in one that’ll help the serious golfer or caddie perform better course management.  For those that aren’t familiar with the term course management, it refers to a golfers ability to make smart decisions during golf.  As any golfer can attest, judgement mistakes pertaining to distance and reading greens can make the difference between a good and bad round of golf.

iGolfWiz can help all levels of golfers improve their course management skills.  Using your iPhone’s camera iGolfWiz can determine your distance from the pin.  After snapping a pic, use it’s built in distance sliders to mark the top and bottom of the pin.  From there iGolfWiz automatically calculates the distance in either yards or meters.  Once you’ve got your distance, getting a recommendation on what club to select is just the press of a button away.

Using iGolfWiz to help you read greens is extremely easy.  Simply lay your iPhone flat down on the service of the green with the arrow lined up directly at the hole, and press the GO button.  In seconds iGolfWiz determines the slope and provides you with a recommended putting line.  It’s that easy!

iGolfWiz requires a little homework and tuning before you’re ready to take it out on the course.  In order for it to accurately read slopes it requires calibration.  iGolfWiz provides a calibration template on their website.  We definitely recommend you print it out instead of attempting to create your own.  Calibration is a critical step so you want to make sure it’s as accurate as possible.  It took us approximetely 5 minutes to complete calibration.

To put iGolfWiz to the test we took it to a local practice facility (aka – driving range).  We snapped pics of pins from various distances and took it for a spin on the putting green.  Overall we were very impressed with the accuracy of the distance finder portion of the app.  Compared to the posted distances at the practice facility iGolfWiz was within a couple yards each time.

If there are any downsides to the distance feature it’s that it requires a steady hand to take a clean picture and depending on your distance from the pin and/or the time of day you may not be able to take a good enough picture to get an accurate measurement.  I’d like to say that using the iPhone’s GPS feature would’ve been a better way to go, but since the iPhone leverages cell towers to determine location the feature would be both intermittent and highly inacurate.  When we tested the app it was 1:30 PM, 83 and sunny, and nothing but blue sky.  In that scenario it worked very well.  We didn’t see too much value in the club selection feature within the app because those that play golf on a regular basis already know how far they hit each of their clubs.  Nonetheless it’s a feature that doesn’t hurt to have in there.

The feature we found most helpful was the BreakReader.  We found that in most cases we were under reading the break and iGolfWiz helped us feel more confident in playing a wider line.  We didn’t find BreakReader to be particularly helpful for long puts though, because to truly trace out the line you need to measure the putt out in sections which we found to be pretty difficult.  However, for those tricky 3-15 footers iGolfWiz can be a big help.

Overall we could tell that a lot of time and thought had been put into iGolfWiz.  We were pleasently suprised in it’s accuracy and can definitely see how the weekend golfer could compliment their practice routine with it.  Where we think iGolfWiz can help you the most is in situations where you’re 150 yards or less from the pin, and slightly off the beaten path (i.e. in trees, in the rough, in a bunker), and on putts that are 15 feet or less.  If you’re in the market for a helfpul golf tool for your iPhone then it’s worth your time to check out iGolfWiz.

Posted by Ryan Johnson
on Jun 15, 2009
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