For me, the best golf GPS devices, and any golf technology for that matter, needs to enhance your playing experience and add a tangible benefit to time on the golf course. Too often I've found over complicated, over dressed pieces of technology getting in the way of the golf at hand.
The reason I mention this is the list of features that come with Voice Caddies new T11 Pro GPS watch perhaps border on the side of distraction, due to the sheer number. One look at the spec sheet, and you'll see why my fears were triggered. Yardages, wind direction and speed confirmation, automatic green slope calculation, practice tempo mode, shot and putt tracking, green undulation data, full hole mapping, pin placement, course and green zoom, putt view for elevation and club recommendations. This isn't even the full list. For some, this might be the dream golf watch teeming with every possible feature and, for some, an overwhelming mess. In this review, I'm going to break down the features I found most useful and the ones perhaps Voice Caddie could've left on the cutting room floor.
Before I get into the features, I must commend the T11 Pro for how premium the casing and screen look and feel. The screen in particular, which uses OLED technology, is a stand out feature versus its competition. It's incredibly bright, the graphics are the clear and the touchscreen is perfectly responsive. It has to be one of the best touchscreens on any GPS golf watch currently on sale.
Sticking with the positives, I'll start with the features I found worked best and used most often during my many rounds of testing. The first of these was the full hole mapping. I find this an invaluable tool on any golf handheld GPS or GPS watch, especially when playing new or unfamiliar courses. On the T11 Pro, the clear graphics really come into their own with this features as it accurately shows you the shape of the hole, shape and size of hazards as well as an accurate shaping of the green. It leaves you with no doubt of what is in front of you and the ability to touch to specific points for a yardage only adds to its usefulness. Some of the useful features on top of this include wind direction and speed (which is calculated when connected with the Voice Caddie app), a driver distance arc (which you can set at your average driver distance to see what parts of the hole you may be bringing into play) as well as a pin arc, which shows you circles 50 yards and 100 yards away from the pin.
The reason this feature works so well is that you barely have to touch the watch to utilise it. Most of this data appears automatically and one glance at the watch face gives you pretty much all the info you need to hit your tee or approach shot. When you walk onto the fairway, the watch will recognize this an automatically zoom in to display the key info around the green for your approach shot. It's automatic functionality like this that I really appreciate on golf technology.
The data gets a little denser as you apporach the green, but I must commend Voice Caddie for how its executed its green reading features. The Smart Approach View, as the brand calls it, is probably where the watch flexes its biggest muscles. It displays the exact shape of the green including arrows to color gradient to show the slope and it also rotates to your exact position on the hole. This rotation feature was my favorite of the bunch. You won't always be approaching the green from position A1, so knowing what part of the green you'll be looking to carry first is really useful to automatically have fed to you on course.
However, this does lead me onto the first features that I don't feel added to my overall experience. Smart Putt View is another impressive feature on the watch, but to me it wasn't as enlightening as I think Voice Caddie thinks it is. This system provides you with critical information on the green factoring in slopes and breaks. It then feeds than information to your watch, giving you prompts like 'aim left', 'aim right over a clublength' or 'uphill, downhill, flat to the pin'. As clever and unique as this is, I found it only scrambled my head when over a putt. That's not to say it's innacurate, far from it, but the last thing I want when I'm trying to read my putts is my watch telling me what to do. Perhaps for some who are poor at reading greens this could become a useful helping hand, but this was a clear case of information overload for me on course. I like the clear color gradient and arrows that give me a really solid idea of where the green is sloping, but the suggestions were a step too far.
The second feature I had a quick go with and then realised this wasn't for me is the built-in tempo practice. When in this menu, you can practice your golf swing against a set tempo number and the watch will feedback whether you're slower, faster or precisely on this set tempo number. Without a clear idea of what is a good tempo number to input into the watch beforehand, I didn't really find much use for this. It's a cool feature you can use anywhere with the right data at your fingertips, but you won't find me practicing my tempo in the fresh meat aisle of my local supermarket any time soon. To be fair to the T11 Pro, these are the only two features I didn't really feel added to the overall experience. There are plenty of others I simply don't have the word count to go into great depth on, but rest assured this watch has plenty to keep you busy. If you a bit of a data geek, then there's so much to get stuck into. Equally if you want to keep it simple, the main features will keep you well informed and not too distracted on course.
As a day-to-day smartwatch, the T11 Pro is perfectly useable too. It's a little bigger than my Apple Watch on the wrist, but when connected to your smartphone will give you notifications from calls and texts. For sure, this isn't anywhere near as comprehensive as a dedicated day-to-day smartwatch, but its usable nonetheless if you need minimal functionality off the course.
Overall, the jury is still out for me on whether this watch is feature packed to the point of become distracting. If you actually used every feature on this watch on every hole you played, you'd be exhausted by data and likely get distracted from the golf at hand. On the other hand, my favorite feature, and the one you'll likely use the most, was the full hole mapping that you barely have to interact with to use to the fullest. With that in mind, I'd say Voice Caddie has put in great efforts to make this watch as feature packed and as hands off as possible.
The sheer amount of features, and the quality of the screen, certainly make it worth it's fairly steep price point in the market. There isn't anything quite like the T11 Pro that I've yet tested, bar perhaps the Garmin Approach S70, and it's certainly an exciting and well executed piece of technology.
