Gobandroid features Gnugo too
A month ago I happened to review most of the free go software available for the android mobile phones. One of the reviewed pieces of software was gobandroid: a simple tool which allowed us to play over a board. During this month there have been some major improvements in this application, which make it feel completely different from the one I reviewed.
The list of improvements starts with the possibility to add skins to the program, with two different skins available in the market. Below these lines there is a comparison so that you can check the difference. As you can see, there are both board and stone textures.
Another major improvement has been imported from Godroid: GnuGo on your mobile phone. As Godroid has been released as GPL, the developer of Gobandroid was able to import the Gnugo function into his software. However, this time gnugo has been implemented as an android service, so it’s running in the background as a standalone service. Fortunately, it’s only called when gobandroid starts and it’s killed when gobandroid is closed (at least theoretically).
Taking into account that gnugo uses around 25-30 Mb of your system’s memory, I’d strongly recommend having any application/task killer so as to stop the process manually when you exit the application. According to gobandroid developer, the addition of gnugo as a service allows for extra additions of other artificial intelligences.
Finally, another recently added feature of gobandroid is the capability to load and save SGF files from your sd card.
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