Golftracker a fledgling companion round the course

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The idea's a good one - have your GPS-equipped smartphone be your companion as you play golf, recording your progress in terms of location and shots, estimating the distance to each hole, and so on. In practice, it's early days for Golftracker's data sets, plus factors like pin locations for a particular day can never be taken into account, but it's worth grabbing this and keeping an eye on it if you're a player. This application is something of a labour of love, so worth supporting.

From the Store description:

Scorecard, GPS tracking, group scores, statistics and distance measurement! Everything you'll need in a golf app! You can share your results between phone/tablet/desktop.

Create and share courses with other users. Some courses already there, but keep adding them!

Being free to download, there's no commercial hole access here, so the courses up for download ('syncing' to your local app) have been created/entered by the developer or submitted by other keen users, so don't expect too much out of the gate. However, you could always get involved by submitting detailed information about your own local course?

Here's Golftracker in action:

Screenshot, GolftrackerScreenshot, Golftracker

This screenshot seems to imply that there are a huge number of courses in the online directory, but in practice the courses in my area weren't there - time for you to get involved for your area! The idea of syncing them to the app is nice, because it means that it doesn't depend on cellular coverage out on the links.... (right) Entering details of your playing partners lets you keep stats and score for them too...

Screenshot, GolftrackerScreenshot, Golftracker

In real time, the map view keeps track of where you are, though the use of Bing Maps obviously limits any kind of accurate match up to each hold - you'd have thought satellite imagery might work better, albeit at the cost of much greater data bandwidth? (right) Keeping track, per hole of how many putts/strokes each player took.

You can grab Golftracker here. There are ad banners, though I'd like to see the developer put in a way to remove these. Heck, golf is a rich person's game, I'd like to see the app at £10 or more, with the developer offering to input details of one chosen course per purchaser. There are lots of ways this could be improved, if it's to take on the bigger commercial titles.

Source / Credit: Windows Phone Store