Chess for Windows Mobile
The Outcome
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | TOTAL | % | ||
| 1 | Pocket Fritz v1.0 | 1 | 2.5 | 3.5 | 4 | 11 | 69% | |
| 2 | PocketGrandmaster 2.1 | 3 | 2.5 | 4 | 4 | 13.5 | 84% | |
| 3 | ChessGenius 1.5 | 1.5 | 1.5 | 4 | 4 | 11 | 69% | |
| 4 | Pocket ChessPartner 1.0 | 0.5 | 1.5 | 0 | 4 | 6 | 38% | |
| 5 | Cascata Chess | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0% | |
The Programs
I own Pocket Fritz (versions 1.0 and 2.0), and ChessGenius. Frank Schneider, co-author of PocketGrandmaster, was kind enough to provide with me with registration codes to unlock the program to its full potential for testing purposes. The staff at LokaSoft provided me with a code to use their Pocket Chesspartner. And the support staff of Purple Software provided me with a copy of their program, Chess, now being developed by Cascata Games.
The Impressions
I'll admit that the order above is actually the order in which I thought things would fall. I fully expected Pocket Fritz to be on top. So I was really surprised when PocketGrandmaster took a 3-1 victory over Fritz.
One thing that didn't surprise me in the least was the performance of Cascata's Chess. It performed poorly on the PalmOS side as well. While the program has been popular and enjoys exposure in terms of retail packaging at some major computer retail stores, I would just strongly advise people looking for a PocketPC chess program to investigate others first.
In the end, I preferred using PocketGrandmaster, Pocket Fritz, and ChessGenius – in that order.
A Showdown
After being a dedicated PalmOS user for a few years, I finally ventured into the PocketPC (now Windows Mobile) world. But no matter which platform I use, I always like to have a good chess program with me. Given the number of programs available, I was curious to see how they performed against one another. As I did with PalmOS chess programs, I decided to pit them against one another with the two machines I had.
The Equipment
For this tournament, I used a Hewlett-Packard Jornada 568 and a Compaq iPaq 5970 (remember those?). The iPaq sports a 400MHz XScale processor compared to the Jornada's 200MHz StrongARM processor. So to try to overcome any potential processing bias, each chess program was installed on both machines. Also, I used a four-game series so that, for example, the Jornada would play two games (one as white, one as black) under Pocket Fritz against the iPaq as ChessGenius; then two games (one as white, one as black) under ChessGenius against the iPaq as Pocket Fritz. It's sound convoluted, and while it's really easy to do, it's harder to describe.
One thing I found which may surprise many people is that programs on the Jornada actually performed better than the same programs programs on the iPaq, despite the Jornada's slower processor. I think the prevailing view here is simply that the operating system on the iPaq wasn't truly optimized to take advantage of the features of the XScale processor (one feature apparently being faster processing). The performance wasn't drastically better, but noticable.
My current machine is an HP iPaq hx2700 with a 624MHz XScale processor. But that's my only Windows Mobile machine. If I acquire a second equivalent machine, I may test newer programs, like Pocket Fritz 2.0 and PocketGrandmaster 3.0.