TAG Heuer Connected Modular 45 Golf Edition GPS Watch Review

Joel Tadman tests the TAG Heuer Connected Modular 45 Golf Edition GPS Watch worth £1,600 out on the course

TAG Heuer Connected Modular 45 Golf Edition GPS Watch Review

Products like this don’t come around all too often in golf so when we heard that TAG Heuer was releasing a golf GPS watch, we had to give it a try.

As you might expect, even the unboxing of the product is a special experience – it comes with three Titleist Pro V1 balls emblazoned with the TAG Heuer logo.

With it’s white strap and green trim, the watch has a sporty, athletic design that doesn’t scream golf. Along with the plain black rubber strap option, this means you can wear it away from the course without looking silly. It’s a touch chunky but surprisingly lightweight and the strap is easily adjustable to fit your wrist, making it comfortable without distracting you as you play.

Setting up the watch with its full functionality requires two free apps to be downloaded on your smartphone, the Google Wear OS and TAG Heuer Golf apps. Going through the various set-up steps in both doesn’t take too long and once you’ve entered the Bluetooth pairing code and downloaded the course, you’re ready to play some golf.

The initial display is bright and bold, clearly displaying the landing area up ahead on a full colour, 2D hole map. Arced lines show you the distance to reach and carry specific points and you can scroll up and down using your finger on the touchscreen (even using your glove hand).

The detail is useful enough, but you can use the TAG Heuer GPS app for a deeper dive, which features brilliant 3D flyovers of the hole.

What is more, if you enter how far you carry each club in your bag before you play in the app's settings, it will then tell you on the 3D map what club you have left to the green should you hit your ball to a certain position off the tee. Very clever.

RELATED: Best Golf GPS Watches 2019

The accuracy of the hole maps was generally very good, tallying closely with what our laser rangefinder was telling us, and distances were quick to update. It lacks the big numbers front, middle and back distances that many golfers like to glance at quickly and some of the hole maps had one or two more or less bunkers than were actually there. So perhaps the maps aren’t as up to date as they could be, but this didn’t really affect our decision making or strategy choices.

TAG Heuer says it has a 25-hour battery life and to preserve it, you can opt to run the GPS technology from your phone rather than the watch. The watch also goes into a black and white power save mode if left inactive for more than a few seconds. You can easily add your score, including putts taken, as you play and even tag shot locations and clubs used, which helps with the performance analysis after your round. Text and call notifications mean you can stay connected with the outside world if you want.

Once back in the clubhouse, if you’ve been tagging your shots you will then have access to a whole host of performance stats via the TAG Heuer app. This includes this like fairways hit, greens in regulation, scrambling, putts per hole and scoring distribution among par threes, fours and fives.

They’re editable if you need to and presented in a colourful format that is easy to digest. The dashboard is a little basic and the fact shots aren’t automatically tracked is added faff while out on the course but it’s arguably worth the extra effort to gain an understanding as to where you need to improve.

It’s important to note that this is so much more than just a golf GPS watch. It is a luxurious, lifestyle timepiece with multiple moderns features where the golf functionality happens to be one of the best on the market.