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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Related posts:

1. Android fever? Now GnuGo
2. 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

Feel free to Flattr this post at flattr.com, if you like it.

Related posts:

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