Bushnell Wingman HD vs Wingman 2: 900 grams, 8 hours, and only the cheaper one charges your phone

The Wingman is the most recognisable object in golf that is not a club. It is the black cylinder magnetically clamped to the cart rail of the group in front, and Bushnell now sells four of them. The Wingman HD sits at the top with a 3.5-inch colour touchscreen, and the question every buyer arrives at is whether a screen is worth the step up from the Wingman 2.

The verdict up front: the HD is a genuinely good product and it is a cart product, in a way that has nothing to do with the screen and everything to do with two numbers Bushnell publishes itself. It weighs 900 grams and it runs for 8 hours. If you ride every round and do not already own a GPS device, buy it. If you walk, push a trolley, or already have yardages on your wrist, the Wingman 2 is the better buy and the gap between them is not close.

What the screen genuinely buys

This is not a token display. The HD's feature list is a handheld GPS's feature list, printed on a speaker: front, centre and back on a 3.5-inch colour touchscreen, hole and GreenView images, and hazards and layups marked with icons, plus live scoring, a shot distance calculator and personalised club settings. Audio is twin 15-watt drivers with two passive radiators in a 360-degree cabinet, it is IP67 rated for dust and water, and it clamps on with the BITE magnet that made the line.

Against that, the Wingman 2 does the yardages by voice. You press the magnetic BITE remote in your pocket and it reads out front, centre and back. No hazards, no map, no picture of the green. That is a real difference and it is the one the marketing is about.

The two numbers that actually decide it

Bushnell rates the HD at 8 hours of battery and 900 grams of mass. The Wingman 2 is rated at roughly 14 hours, about three rounds, and it is a fraction of the weight.

Sit with that for a second, because it runs the wrong way round. The more expensive device in the range is heavier and runs for less time than the cheaper one. That is not a defect — a colour touchscreen is the single hungriest component you can bolt to a battery, and the housing to carry it has to be bigger — but it inverts the usual assumption that the flagship is the more capable object in every direction. On battery it is a two-round device where its cheaper sibling is a three-round device.

The 900 grams is the more decisive of the two. Bushnell ships a carabiner clip as well as the magnet, which reads as permission to walk with it, and reviewers who have tried have been blunt about the result: Golf Monthly's reviewer found it knocked against the back of his legs as he walked and concluded the device really wants to be on a cart. That is nearly a kilo hanging off a bag strap or a trolley frame, and a trolley frame is exactly where a screen this size is most awkward to read anyway, because it sits at hip height and behind you.

So the screen is not really the decision. The decision is how you get round a golf course. The HD is designed, weighted and rated for a vehicle.

Both of these want your phone, which changes what the HD replaces

Here is the part that is genuinely under-reported, and it is worth knowing before you spend. Bushnell's own product page treats the Bushnell Golf app as an optional extra that adds benefits, and markets the HD as a GPS speaker. Every hands-on review I can find describes the same flow in practice: pair the speaker to a phone, open the Bushnell Golf app, and the yardages, hole layouts and hazard positions appear on the screen. Plugged In Golf states flatly that the app is required to engage the golf functions.

Plan on carrying the phone, in other words. The Wingman 2 has never pretended otherwise — its course library is delivered through the same app — so this is a shared condition rather than a mark against the HD specifically. But it changes the value proposition on the flagship in a way worth being precise about. The HD does not remove a device from your round. It removes a glance: instead of pulling a phone out of a pocket, you read a bigger screen at eye level. That is a genuine convenience and it is a smaller thing than one device replacing another.

Which is why the upgrade only pays in one specific case: you ride a cart, and you do not currently own a GPS watch or a handheld. Then the HD is doing a second job and the premium is buying you a device you would otherwise have bought separately. If there is already a watch on your wrist, you are paying the premium for a duplicate reading of a number you can already see, and the money is better left where it is.

The cheaper one has the feature the system actually needs

This is the detail that tipped the piece. The Wingman 2 carries a USB charge-out port so it can top up your phone during a round. The HD's published feature list does not include one.

Think about what that means in a setup where the yardages are coming through a phone running a GPS app with Bluetooth on for four hours, which is about as hard as you can work a phone battery short of filming. The cheaper device can keep the source of the data alive. The more expensive device, with the shorter battery of the two, cannot. There is a plausible version of a Sunday afternoon in which the HD owner ends up with a dead phone and a very good speaker, and the Wingman 2 owner does not.

Which one to buy

Buy the HD if you ride a cart every round, you have no GPS watch or handheld, and you want hazards and layups on a screen you can read at a glance rather than a voice reading three numbers. It is the best thing in the range at being that, and the audio is the best in the range full stop.

Buy the Wingman 2 if the speaker is the product and the yardages are the bonus — which, honestly, is most people. It runs longer, it weighs far less, it charges your phone, and audible front, centre and back covers the great majority of the shots you actually have a decision to make on.

Buy the Wingman Mini if you carry. At 170 grams, IPX7 and about ten hours it is the only one in the range designed to live on a person rather than on a vehicle, and we rated it well for exactly that reason in our Wingman Mini review.

There is also a middle rung, the Wingman View, which adds an LCD showing distance and track information without the flagship's hazards, layups and hole imagery. It is a sensible piece of product laddering and it is the hardest of the four to argue for, because the two reasons to want a screen — reading a number without asking the speaker to announce it, and getting a proper strategic picture of the hole — sit at opposite ends of the range rather than in the middle.

Who should buy none of them

Two groups. If you play a quiet members' course where music on the fairway would raise eyebrows, the golf functions are not enough on their own to justify any of these, and you can have better yardages from a cheaper device that does not play anything. And if you are trying to solve an accuracy problem rather than a convenience one, a GPS speaker is the wrong shape of answer entirely — audio and on-screen GPS give you distances to the middle of a green, not to the flag, and the case for picking one primary yardage device and demoting the rest is one we have made in the three-device problem.

The rest of the GPS field is in our best golf GPS guide.