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I picked up my R50 when it was released, and it’s been an excellent addition to my golf collection, but some gaps would make this product incredible.
1. Playing individual holes and easy switching between holes/shots
Right now, the R50 allows you to play a large variety of courses, but if you want to play individual holes or shots on holes, you’re stuck playing the course to the hole you want to play and doing mulligan after mulligan to practice the hole or shot you want. If you miss the mulligan due to the short time constraint, you’ll have to do another 17 holes to get back there.
Bring single-hole and/or shot capability, and it would be amazing. I’d love to have the ability to practice a drive on a particular hole or practice my tee shot on a par 3. The golf score app allows you to change holes with relative ease, the R50 is missing it.
2. Bag mapping features
Garmin knows how far you hit your clubs, so a bag mapping feature would be really accurate, particularly if it takes into account your current form at any given point in time. Right now, the R50 doesn’t have bag mapping or a wedge matrix.
The next version could introduce some advanced features. Garmin also knows how far the ball should travel based on air temperature, altitude, and humidity, as they have it built into your SIM. How about a bag map that adjusts for the temperature and altitude on the day, with the option to print a small bag map to take along.
3. Range enhancements
The variety of ranges on the R50 is good, but the one feature missing is the ability to set flag distances. They have beautiful island greens, but sometimes I find myself battling to get a target to match a specific club, because the distances are 20-25 yards apart.
I’ll try a different range option only to find out that range also has similar green distances to the last, so I may have to go through 2 or 3 to match the distance I want on a particular iron.
What I would like is either:
the ability to adjust green distances up or down, even if it’s by 10-15 yards or
Ranges with more island greens that have smaller increments, so it’s easier to find the distances you want.
The ability to create green distances on the general range, as there are none. This would mean setting the middle of the green at a predefined distance, and setting the middle
4. Watch integration
Right now, a big thing missing from the R50 is a method to make changes on the unit, like club selections, without bending over and physically changing the unit. With Garmin’s watch ecosystem, they already have a perfect piece of hardware at their disposal to do it.
It doesn’t have to be complex, for the range it just needs to be an up club and down club function, and for the course, the same, along with a few extras, like mulligans or adjusting shot direction.
5. Gaming and playlists
Imagine building your own playlist of your favourite holes from different courses to create the ultimate golf course. The 12th on Augusta, the 7th at Pebble Beach, 17th at TPC Sawgrass, 18th St Andrews, all in one ultimate course. Create a course of the most difficult holes in the world and share it with your friends or other users to see who can score the lowest.
Let the golfers out there build the virtual courses they’d like to see, and imagine how many courses would appear with a ranking system of the most played courses.
Add a “calculate your handicap“ gaming feature to help people track their ball striking and short ga, me to really complete the gaming feature.
There are so many great gaming opportunities in golf SIMs that would make it far more fun and playable.
Conclusion
I think the Garmin holds a lot of potential, because it has strong hardware. That means all of these upgrades would be possible; it just comes down to programming time.
That’s my top 5. If you can think of any I missed, feel free to add them to the list.
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