oobgolf live scoring via iPhone
Before I get into the review I will point out that I am fully aware that my golf game sucks, unfortunately I am not yet wealthy enough to not need to work so it will likely continue to be fairly horrible for a while. With that out of the way this review is of using an iPhone (which I love) to enter scores realtime on oobgolf.com (which I also love). Read on for all the details and lots of screenshots.
If you don’t know what an iPhone is you’ve probably been living under a rock and therefore aren’t seeing this website so we’ll skip that; in case you don’t know about oobgolf let me give you a quick run down. Oobgolf is a golf social networking site that also has the ability to track your progress as you work on your golf infection game. You also have the ability to view your friends scores, and a variety of other social networking type activities.. Oh and they seem to have a gift for finding interesting and amusing stories which are usually somehow related to golf.
In this review I’ll be focusing on the mobile functionality of the site which lets you track your scores via a mobile device while you’re on the course; to my knowledge oob is the only site to do this. To access the mobile functionality you simply point your mobile device at mobile.oobgolf.com when you first get to the site you are presented with this screen:
If you aren’t signed in you’ll get prompted with a login screen, it looks just like a login screen. From here you can start entering new scores, view past scores or look for a new course. I find 99% of the time when I come here on my iPhone I’m at a course and about to start tracking a round so that’s where we will pick up. Once you click (or in the case of my iPhone tap) “Enter New Score” you are taken to a screen where you provide some basic information about your round:
This is really nice, choose your course/tees being played from, etc. Courses you’ve previously entered scores for are in the drop down, if you are playing a course you haven’t played before the “find new course” option gives you a simple search which I have yet to have fail to find my course (oob has a HUGE course database). If you choose to play 9 holes the next screen will ask you if you are playing the front 9 or the back 9, this is important, you’ll see why shortly.
Once you’ve selected the basic information about your round you are brought to the entry screen for the first hole:
As you can see the entry screen provides you with information about each hole as you approach it, mobile oobgolf really is a full scorecard replacement! I usually take the scorecard and just turn it to the course map and leave it there. Entering scores on the iPhone is pretty simple and straight forward, the drop downs are nice and pretty as seen below:
As you can see the iPhone zooms in on the drop down you have highlighted and you can use the nice Previous and Next buttons on the iPhone to jump quickly from field to field if you enter a text field you are presented with the standard iPhone keyboard as you can see in the next screenshot.
There is one caveat here, the keyboard doesn’t start in numeric mode for you, it goes into text mode so you have an additional button press to pop it into numeric entry mode the iPhone will actually allow you to put a text value into the number fields which is clearly an issue. I have no idea if this is an iPhone issue or an oob issue but I suspect it’s the iPhone. I had a blackberry 8800 prior to my iPhone and it would automatically detect that the field was a numeric field and not a text field, so either there’s a bug in the iPhone browser or oob needs to code something specific for the iPhone (which is still an iPhone problem in my book).
In terms of a general comparison to the blackberry I have to say I think the blackberry holds a slight edge over the iPhone for this purpose. The click wheel is the main reason for this, you can use the blackberry with one hand to enter your scores VERY easily, with the iPhone it requires two hands. I really don’t think there is anything oob could do to make this better on the iPhone short of having a dedicated iPhone version that used drop downs for ALL of the fields on each hole. Drop downs are easy to operate with one hand using the iPhone but typing is not, I can see where on more traditional mobile phones with numeric keypads drop downs might be a pain though. That said with an iPhone or any device with a click wheel (like a blackberry) drop downs are tops when it comes to quick entry.
As you’re scoring your round oob calculates your projected score for you which is great, it’s based on your handicap as calculated by oob so the more rounds you track with oob the more accurate this will be. The pages that load each time you submit the score for a hole are very small so things move nice and quickly, I’ve never felt like I’ve been waiting for a page to load. Also if you get a phone call while you’re using oob to track the score simply hop back into your browser after the call and you can continue entering your score right where you left off, this works even if your browser closes and you have to log back in, very nice.
When you finish the round you get a summary that looks like the screen below:
A very nice screen showing you your total yardage (based on the tees you chose at the beginning), par, your actual score, +/- (which actually doesn’t seem to work for some reason), Net score (which is your score taking your handicap and the course difficulty into account), and some nice statistics based on your game. Oh yea, it also shows the effect the round had on your handicap as oob calculates it. One of the nice things about using oob is that you not only get all these additional stats, you don’t have to do any math, oob takes care of all of it for you.
As you can see this all works fairly well (quite frankly it works fantastically), that said there are a few minor glitches at least when using the iPhone. I’m not sure if these are iPhone specific or not but in the interest of being complete I’m including them here. The oob guys are pretty great so if they read this it wouldn’t surprise me if they were fixed by the time I play again.
Issue #1 - Pressing the “Go” button on the iPhone keyboard tries to cancel the round, I’m guessing this is simply that they have the default submit button on the page defined as the cancel button instead of the “next” button but I don’t know for sure. Here’s what happens if you press “Go” instead of closing the iPhone keyboard and actually clicking on the “next” button on the oob page itself:
It’s not a disaster or anything but it would be nice if you could use the “go” button on the iPhone keyboard (less clicks)
Issue #2 - You can put text into numeric fields (IE your score, or number of putts) this was mentioned before in the review and it’s really not all that big of a deal but it is a minor annoyance.
Issue #3 - The projected score formula breaks around a hole or two prior to the round end. For some reason the formula being used to calculate what your projected score is breaks as you get close to the end of the round, here you can see I haven’t even played the 9th hole in this 9 hole round and it’s saying my score is projected to be what my score is after playing only 8 holes.
and then here you can see on the 8th hole it’s giving me 5 shots to finish the round in to make the projected score, as you’ve seen I’m no where near that good.
This issue is certainly very minor, as the projected score feature is merely a “nice to have”, of course it would be nice if it worked through the whole round.
That’s it, overall you can’t beat oobgolf for tracking your golf round. Sure there are some native applications out there for different devices that will track scores for you but none of them give you the power that oob does or the nice charting, etc. on the site once you’re back at your computer. Not to mention the ability to share your scores with your friends, etc.
If you’re a golfer and you haven’t given oobgolf a shot I’d definitely suggest you do this season! Here you can see my oobgolf profile and of course I already know how bad I am so feel free to not comment on that.
Tags: apple, blackberry, golf, iphone, sports
I just stopped by your blog and thought I would say hello. I like your site design. Looking forward to reading more down the road.
Robert Michel
Hey Yoshi, the last time you played, I didn’t receive the email about your live round until 7:54 pm, and then I received three emails five minutes apart. That’s whack!
There are several posts out there about this, I think taking there reference could have made this post or article really informative. I am not saying this information is not good. But I must say that the information provided here was unique, but to make it more near to complete, supporting with other previous information will have been really good. The points you have touched here are really important, so I will post some of the information here to make this really good for all the newbie’s here. Thanks for this information. Really helpful!