Golf GPS Apps For Android

OK, so you have a fancy touchscreen Smartphone with the Android operating system (perhaps a Verizon Droid or even a brand new Nexus One from Google), and you want to spice it up with a compatible golf GPS. Maybe you're already familiar with GolfShot, GolfLogix, and some of the other popular golf GPS apps available for the iPhone and BlackBerry Smartphones, and now you're wondering what the choices are for Android. The number of apps in the Android market may be kind of puny compared to the huge number of apps available for the iPhone. But there are Android golf GPS apps available. The following list of five top-notch products is a start.

GolfCard was selected by both CNN and Time magazine as the best iPhone golf app for father's day (2009). Now it's available for Android phones; both Sprint and Verizon have recently featured GolfCard in their new phone ads. It looks promising, and should probably be more popular than it already is. This inexpensive rangefinder has a database of 28,000 courses, a scorecard for multiple players, statistical analysis, and no subscription fees.

VERIZON

GreenFinder, which is a popular GPS app that also works on Blackberry, iPhone, and Windows Mobile phones, can be downloaded and used five times for free. It gives you distances to the front, center, and back of the green, as well as distances to fairway hazards and the distance of your last shot. It costs less than a round of golf and there are no additional fees: you can download all the courses you need and you can even mark your own courses.

FreeCaddie also works on Blackberry, iPhone, Windows Mobile, and Java enabled phones. The free version displays only the distances to the front, center, and back of greens. If you want the really good stuff like distances to bunkers and hazards, a shot distance function, the ability to map your own points, or statistics and scorekeeping, then you need to upgrade to FreeCaddie Pro.

Pocket Caddy from Satsports has 3D flyovers of the entire course and individual holes, distances to the front, center, and back of the green and other points of interest. It also has shot recording, statistical analysis and and a scorecard. With Pocket Caddy you can get a map of your home course included with purchase, or you can easily map courses yourself using Google Earth.

SkyDroid (which is practically free) has distances to the front, center and back of every green on the course, as well as distances to water hazards, bunkers, and other course features. It also has a satellite map view of every hole. You can track the distance of your last shot, download all the courses you want for no extra cost, and you can even use SkyDroid's Course Mapper to easily map your own courses.

Golf GPS Apps For Android

iPhone Vs Android

AT&T has the iPhone and until just recently the smart phone Goliath was king of the castle. Back in late October, Verizon Wireless unleashed the Motorola Droid, a device that runs on the android platform. Another Android phone gaining a great deal of hype is the Nexus One by Google. Apple actually went after Google with a patent lawsuit. It's no secret that Apple's Steve Jobs and Google CEO Eric Schmidt aren't very fond of one another. The Google CEO was asked to step down from the Apple Board and an Anti-trust investigation was started. Schmidt said he wanted to "Kill the iPhone" and Jobs to offense to that saying something along the lines of,

"We didn't enter the search game, they entered the phone game so they clearly want to kill the iPhone."

VERIZON

So the war of words had begun. The Google Nexus One is already available on the T-Mobile and AT&T networks and will be available for the Verizon network in the second quarter of 2010. With Apple being the first player in the touch screen mobile device arena there hasn't been a worthy adversary until now.

The new Android platform is growing by leaping and bounds everyday and many mobile app developers are creating iPhone apps but also latching on to the android platform. One of the drawbacks to the Android platform early on was that the Apple App Store dwarfed that of Android but over the recent months more and more Android apps are becoming available and Android is actually taking a decent portion of the market back from Apple.

Here are some comparisons between the technologies.

Android:

Operating system: Android OS that uses a modified version of Linux kernel. Originally developed by Android, Inc. and recently purchased by Google; Allows developers to write managed code in Java.; Allows users to multi-task.

Phones available on the Android platform: Motorola droid, HTC Nexus One, HTC Eris, HTC Hero,HTC Tattoo, MyTouch 3G, LG Eve just to name a few.

iPhone:

Operating system: iPhone OS-Derived from the Mac OS X, shares the Darwin foundation. The OS has four abstraction layers, the core OS layer, the core services layer, the media layer and the cocoa touch layer. The OS uses less than500 MB of the device's memory. Unable to multi-task.

Phones available on the iPhone platform: Apple iPhone

From just looking at these stats, I think the Android Platform is going to be the next big thing with smart phones. The iPhone just seems so locked up and controlled. I know you can "jailbreak" the iPhone but who wants to do that to their device? I really like the Nexus One, it has a sleek design and has the ability to multi-task. I know the apps aren't to level of the iPhone just yet, but give them time and I'm sure they will be more than worthy in a year or so.

iPhone Vs Android