Chess Genius

Hands down the best chess related thing you can have on your phone. When used thoughtfully this is a powerful learning tool that world champions would kill for back in the day. A must purchase for chess enthusiasts.

There are a lot of options for chess engines. The icons for the pieces need an upgrade here. I found only one of six appealing. Two have lo res graphics, which is unacceptable for a premium priced app. One set is ugly, and the Russian set is two shades of grey, without enough contrast. The list of captured pieces is nice, and surprisingly missing from a lot of other apps.

I love chess programs on my Mac and Palm and even did on my older Windows Mobile phone. Now that my contract ended with my old carrier I immediately bought my iPhone and started to look foir a chess game. What a disappointing assortment of the usual suspects. Interface problems, poor play, 3D graphics that might look good but during play the pieces would hide each other or become hard to see, not many options to adjust play or display -- I downloaded a few and regretted it and finally decided to just wait. Wow, am I glad I did because CHESS GENIUS is the best chess program ever on the Palm and Windows Smartphone. Now that it is on the iPhone everyone here can enjoy its crisp graphics, easily and widely-adjustable features and, of course, game play unmatched by any other chess-playing engine on a mobile device. This is it, this is the one. If you're a patzer happy with just looking at "somethin' cool" on your screen go get a program with candy-floss graphics. But if you are a Player, if you love chess, if you like a display designed not to distract but to involve -- download this soon. Heck, download it today.

- A truly GREAT user interface: The Interface makes moving peices absolutely foolproof and very pleasurable. Very creatively done, and the first iphone chess app I've found that really succeeeds in this way. - Powerful Engine: This is a big benefit for players at any strength. If you want to dial down the playing strength, Genius will be able to move SO much faster than other engines while playing at a given level of actual playing strength. That speed adds greatly to the joy of the experience. The improved playing strength is also great for finding the real solutions to real world chess problems. - Excellent features- Many of which I've not found in the competitors. They did a beautiful job on stepping forward and back over the move history, and of easily getting the iphone to take over the players position whenever desired. I've used ChessGenius for over 10 years, first on Palm, and then windows mobile, and I'm delighted to have Genius now on the iPhone, and so beautifully adapted. It's Must Have Application.

I have two complaints, however. I wish it would allow you to pick a rating to play against. At 3 second difficulty, I have yet to beat it (or even come close). I can easily handle easy 13 though. What I wish is that it would have a something like "play against 1800" or 1600 or whatever elo level, or a sliding scale, or whatever. Next: I love the fact that you can upload pgn files to the phone and review the games. I have millions of games on my computer. However, my complaint is that I don't have a webspace to publish them to, so I cant get them onto the program. If anyone knows how to do that, or if Lang Software could make it easier to upload the files in the next update, that would be awesome. Still a 5 star app, and I highly recommend it to the moderate-advanced player. It moves with excellent precision, and lightning speed, and more than fulfills my expectations. My complaints are more like suggestions to improve an almost perfect program