A lot of people are golf aficionados, but few golfers want to spend time on the phone getting their desired golf tee times – which of course is when they will start their game. Fortunately, virtually all major private and public golf courses now make it easy to book online golf times over the World Wide Web. In addition to available tee golf times, you’ll also be able to learn about the course (if you’ve never played there), and often may find valuable discounts that are available only to those who book online.

The Main Advantages

The best reasons to book golf tee times over the Internet are speed and control. It’s faster to book times online because you can usually use filters in order to control the information you receive. That way, you won’t have to waist time slogging through megabytes of irrelevant material, making it easier to find the course tee schedule- including discounted times, whether or not late evening golf course times to tee are available, and more.

Where Are You Going To Play?

This is especially useful if you are planning to visit an out-of-town location, are planning to play a few rounds and need information on local course tee golf times. For example, if you are planning a business trip to the Los Angeles area and don’t want the extra expense of taking out a temporary country club membership, you can easily limit your search to public golf courses in the LA area (be warned: there are literally dozens). You can further limit your search for online golf times to areas within a few miles of where you’ll be staying.

Consider The Family

If you are going to have family members with you who are not necessarily golfers, you can also find out if the courses you have in mind have other facilities, such as swimming and tennis, when you book your online tee golf times.

As you can see, there are many good reasons to book your golf tee times online.

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.

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.