I spent a little bit of time before putting in review because I really wanted to test this out.
First I read about the Air where it could track shots without sensors attached to clubs. I was very intrigued so I tried that first. The results were less than impressive. It did manage to pick up most of my shots but didn't do well with chipping, pitching and putting. In addition, without the sensors, Air doesn't know what club was used for each shot so that info would have to filled in via the app. The good thing is that it is pretty real time so you can see in the app how far your last shot went.
Then I attached the sensors to my clubs and did several rounds to build up data points. With the sensors, the system does come alive a lot more. Each shots were recorded with what club was used, along with positions and putt distances. All of this data went into the app for in depth analysis. More on that a little later. The sensors are fairly easy to install to the end of grips and pairing them in the app is pretty straight forward and painless as well. I have used Game Golf tracker before and these trackers are considerably larger and heavier. They actually change the feel of the clubs slightly and took a little bit for me to get use to having them on. One interesting thing to note is that if you were doing practice hitting an extra ball or two from roughly the same spot, only 1 is recorded.
Now I'll dive a little more into the data collected and what the app did with them. Overall, I'd say the app did a pretty decent job breaking down the data into many different segments to show where your strength and weakness are. I have long struggled with putting and the app showed it to me without any sugarcoating. See attached screenshot. It also aggregates your distance data for each club so you can get a better sense on club choices in real playing conditions. The app also has suggestions on areas to work on with the biggest impact, based on the data collected.
There are a few things I am not impressed though. For example, the tracker knows position and elevation where each shots were hit but it doesn't seem that the club distance takes elevation into consideration. If you happen to use a club mostly on uphill shots, it would show up significantly shorter than the actually distance, and vice versa on downhills. Maybe in the future they can improve the calculation to take that into consideration.
One other thing to note is that if the tracker leaves your phone for a little while the app could get a little confused. On my course, there's a spot where we typically leave our push cart at the bottom of a huge hill after the 2nd shot, and pick up the cart again on the way back after tee shot on the following hole. On one occasion the tracker put all the detected shots 2 holes later and created a huge mess and took me a while to clean up and make corrections in the app.
Now the value. I'd say this isn't cheap with subscription starting at $100 per year and increases as more devices you have. They do include 5 replacement sensors with each yearly renewal so you get a whole new set after 3 years. The data is insightful for people who are serious about improving their game but it might be too much for people who just play for fun.
Bottom line, this is a great set of tools to help a golfer identify areas to work on and track progress. It's not cheap but nothing is cheap in golf world. It's not a terrible value for the cost of a couple of lessons each year to be able to track all aspects of the game.
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