With This Golf GPS Speaker, You Come for the Music and Stay for the Golf
The Arena Media Brands, LLC and respective content providers to this website may receive compensation for some links to products and services on this website.
I was sold on Blue Tees Golf’s Player+, a combination music speaker and GPS unit, even before I got near a golf course.
It was a Jerry Maguire "you-had-me-at-hello" moment once I paired Player+ with my iPhone and dipped into one of my iTunes playlists. The Player+ speaker is bad-ass. (That’s A-plus, in case you need a translator.)
For the record, I didn’t go maximum bass on Metallica’s Greatest Hits or Def Leppard but the clarity and depth of sound from a six-inch pipe-shaped speaker was stunning. I would pay the $199 (suggested retail) just for the speaker. It is that good.
Shop Blue Tees line of GPS units and rangefinders through our partners at PGA TOUR Superstore
Come for the tunes, stay for the golf. It turns out Player+ offers outstanding golf options, also. You may not be familiar with Blue Tees Golf, which also makes quality rangefinders, but they are quickly becoming best in class in the music/electronic yardages category. And that’s saying a lot because Bushnell, the long-time industry leader in this area, is still turning out great products.
The Blue Tees Golf Player+ has an easy-to-read display with plenty of functionality.
Courtesy Blue Tees Golf
But Player+ is an eye-opener. I didn’t know how much I needed it until I got one.
(Buy the Player+ here through our partners at PGA TOUR Superstore)
“This is a revolutionary product,” said Taylor Herber, vice president of sales for Blue Tees Golf. “It’ll be the best selling golf electronics item in 2024, in my opinion.”
What makes it revolutionary is its touchscreen interface.
“I consider Bushnell’s original Wingman a revolutionary product and I believe it’s still the No. 1-selling GPS product of all-time,” Herber said. “I remember first seeing it at the PGA Merchandise Show and thinking, ‘Man that is really cool.’ It’s still a good product but it doesn’t have our user interface. We have a fully functioning touch screen. I won’t call it an iPhone inside your speaker but it’s very similar.
“That’s the No. 1 feature people are connecting with it. They utilize touch screens every day. It’s so intuitive. My 5-year-old son knows how to use an iPad or a cell phone and he knows how to use Player+. My dad is almost 70 and he can use it, too. It’s got a bright, colorful and very appealing screen versus the Bushnell analog screen.”
The Player+ provides all the details you need:
- Yardages to the green—front, middle, back.
- Yardages to relevant hazards.
- Color maps of each hole.
- Access to 40,000 courses worldwide.
- Audio yardages. Instead of looking at the screen for the yardage, you can set Player+ to deliver the number audibly. (If only I could get it in Arnold Schwarzenegger’s voice as The Terminator like on my Waze navigation app: “I am looking for Sarah Conner but I vill get you to your destination furrst! Follow me … if you vant to live!”)
- How far I hit my drive. (Please stop embarrassing me with these numbers.)
- My score. (Hey, I said, “Please!”)
And more. The tip-off that Blue Tees Golf has made it to the big leagues is by how many rangefinders, GPS units and magnetic music speakers are getting accidentally left behind by golfers.
“We find a lot of them in carts,” said Chuck Garbedian, a longtime golf industry expert at Broadlands Golf Club in North Prairie, Wis. “It’s almost a 50-50 split now between Bushnells and Blue Tees. That tells you how much Blue Tees's market has gone up. Their technology is equal to, if not better than, Bushnell. Blue Tees is more user-friendly. You can go forward and backward easily on the screen. On Bushnell’s Wingman, you have to toggle through stuff. The Player+ also has the audio experience, which is nice, and the hazard information, which is really nice.”
The Player+ comes with a magnetic strip—but don't forget to take it after your round.
Courtesy Blue Tees Golf
The secret behind all this isn’t the hardware, it’s the software. Blue Tees Golf went all-in on an app it could continue to expand. “We built a really large customer service program on the back end of it,” Herber said. “Our app is incredible, it’s the brains of the device. We’re building a digital eco system so all our products can speak to each other and feed info to the app. You’re going to get as much information in our ecosystem as you’d ever need to get better. We can build in some teach apps. We have a pretty robust road map of what we want to do in the next three to five years.”
The Player+ is waterproof, by the way. Which is a good thing. “My kids think it’s hilarious to throw our speaker into the pool,” Herber said. “We always take it to the beach, too. It’s super-durable and has a power bank. If our phones run low, we just plug them in. It’s a bit of a digital Swiss army knife. There is a lot packed into this one thing.
“I use my Player+ more at home now than I do on the golf course because I don’t have time to get out and play that much. We know people will use this off the course so it has to perform as a great speaker. Otherwise, there’s no point.”
The Player+ comes with a one-year premium membership that includes access to what are considered premium features, which includes hole maps, shot-tracking and hazards. After that, it’s $49 a year to subscribe to the premium app, $99 for three years.
“If you don’t subscribe, you’ll always get front-middle-back to the green for free,” Herber said. “People say they don’t need all that other data—their driving distance, the scorekeeping, the distance to hazards—but when they have it, they find snippets of data they like.”
Overall, golf is being gamified to appeal to younger golfers who are used to handling digital gear. “My grandfather was a diehard golfer,” Herber said. “I loved gambling with his men’s golf group when I was a teenager. Some functionality for that will be on the app eventually.”
There is a tracking capability with limited range on the Player+. It doesn’t work once you drive off the property but if you’re still at the golf course and left Player+ behind you should be able to locate it.
“I had a guy finish recently and I said, Have you got everything?” Garbedian said. “He says, ‘Yup.’ I see a speaker on the cart. I say, Have you got your speaker? He says, ‘Yup.’ I point at it and say, How about this one? He looks over, shakes his head and says, ‘Oh, man …’ We try to educate our cart kids and staff to ask three things: Did you take your wallet, your cell phone and your rangefinder? Now we’ve added fourth one, your speaker.”
Blue Tee Golf’s Player+ is smart and that’s good because sometimes, we aren’t.