Here you have the videoreview

Beware of the height you need to get above the board. It took me several attempts till I realised I had to stand up and rise my hands a little bit to fit the 19×19 board on an average table. Otherwise, the program will cut down the sides of the board… though I still don’t understand the reasoning behind this.

Another point which I’m curious about is the need for internet connection. Since the image needs to be interpreted on a remote server, the image needs to be uploaded… but wouldn’t it be possible to make the process locally with the latest phones? I mean, during the second half of this year some dual-core cell phones have been released so it would be an interesting option to add to the app.

Here you have the market links for both apps:
Go Scoring Camera – Trial version
Go Scoring Camera – Full Version 

On the next videoreview, I’m going to talk about another awesome app which turned out to be very useful at our club.

Related posts:

1. KGS Android Client
2. Android Go applications

Everything went fine -successful Google checkout, KGS client only weights 470 kb- so I was logging into KGS within two minutes. Unfortunately, my Online-Go-Anxiety (aka OGA) focused my mind on watching games, so I’m still lacking the playing experience with this client.

I’ve got a HTC Magic, one of the first devices, with a low resolution, but the board, avatars and bowls still showed up nicely, so I guess results on better devices should be somewhat nicer. After having watched 3 games on a row, it was time to actually analyse the app instead of just KGS games.

The lowest part of the screen includes the navigation buttons which, if pressed long enough, bring up some extra options, and the chat window.

While this app is the only -and, therefore, the best- KGS client, it disappointed me somehow. In fact, what worried me the most, was that games with lots of tenukis were hard to follow. While marking the stone on a normal PC with a circle is enough, it seems to fall short as a notification in such a small screen. Maybe some sort of double stone-blinking would be helpful.

One of the games I saw included a nice amount of peeping tesujis so I thought of sharing it. Unfortunately, there isn’t any “Save game to disk” option. The tactile function is weird while watching a game, as you can point on the board and make a square appear, but its utility remains unknown for me. The trackpad moves this square around the board instead of navigating through the game.

Though my hopes may have been to high, I’d say that, to sum it up and taking into account its 15$ price, I’m a little disappointed with the final result. Obviously, since these 15$ include two months of the KGS plus service, it may be useful for users who would like to give KGS+ a try, but I don’t think it is fair for users who wouldn’t use it. On the other hand, I must admit that I haven’t tried to play with it, since I got some deficiencies in my internet signal while I was on the train and I suffered my monthly OGA crisis.

Edit: You’ll find further discussion on the comments, including it’s developer and KGS owner, Bill Schubert.

No related posts.

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.

Related posts:

1. Android fever? Now GnuGo

Instead of reviewing these pieces of software, I’d like to comment on an uncommon application I found recently, its name: GOdroid.
GOdroid is the first published attempt to have an artificial intelligence on our mobile phones, it features GnuGo 3.8 with board sizes from 9×9 to 19×19 and handicap. According to the developer’s announcement the strength of this program ranges from 8k to 12k, which may pose a nice challenge when given handicap.Customizing the time limits would be a good feature for the next update, since increasing its thinking time limits would improve its strength. Personally, playing this engine on a desktop computer with longer time settings proves a nice challenge, while I can regularly beat this software on my Android.
What happens when this application is played on a more powerful device? Most mainstream android phones around have a core running at around 300-500 Mhz, but there are more powerful ones coming out such as Nexus one with 1 Ghz. Will the bot’s thinking time be reduced or the strength increased? If anyone wants to send me a Nexus One so that I can try it, contact me by email

When it comes to the interface, there aren’t any big innovations but the fact that it allows to play stones through 2 systems:
a) First tap on the screen to place, second to confirm.
b) Move the stone with the track ball and press it to confirm.
Personally, the best results are obtained by placing the stone with the finger and making small corrections or confirming with the track ball.

The applications is released as freeware and you can download it directly from your android market.

Update: as kaliya pointed out at the commentaries, GOdroid isn’t correctly displayed on phones with QVGA (320×240, such as HTC tattoo) or lower resolutions. Please, check your screen resolution if you find any problems with the board display. Other mainstream devices, such as HTC Dream or Magic, have a slightly higher resolution.

Related posts:

1. Gobandroid features Gnugo too
2. Go Scoring Camera for Android
3. Android Go applications

Android phones have already been around for a couple of years, but it wasn’t till a couple of months ago that it really got into the Go community. Android Go fever started with Wms announcing a KGS client for these mobile phones, which would be available in short term through the market. In November 2009 there were only two go applications available in the market; within 3 months the number of applications is, at least, three times. There is quite a wide range of features among these apps: IGS clients, KGS clients, just boards, just sgf viewers, clocks, freeware, shareware…

In order to let you know a few of them without making it too long, I decided to limit the reviewed software to freeware:

You may think that it’s a little bit confusing to record videos this way, but it’s incredible hard to actually record the android screen with software. In fact, by using this method, I let you see how does the touch screen work with go games, which is relevant when it comes to placing stones in a tiny board through a touch screen.

After a couple of games, the zooming-in method seems to work faster and is more useful for blitz games, but I’ve already made a few misplacing errors; so KGS’ method, while it seems less intuitive and slower, turns up to be more precise. Personally, I would stick to the KGS method till the other clients implement some sort of “undo” once the stone is played or “confirmatin button”. Unwillingly misplacing a stone is highly frustrating.

Further details:

Gobandroid	Acego	KoalaGo (free version)	Goigo	Go clock

Related posts:

1. Android fever? Now GnuGo
2. Gobandroid features Gnugo too
3. KGS Android Client

-Kgs client for android phones.
-Go in google wave

Though these two projects started recently, they are improving at a fast pace, so I’d recommend tracking these posts.

No related posts.