Recommend An Android Device To Play On KGS

[wms]

At this time the android client is still missing a lot of features that the main client has.

Could you expand on this please?

My general usage of KGS is as follows:

* Use auto-match to find and play a rated game.
* Attend (as a student, not a teacher) private / group classes.
* View archived lectures in KGS+.

Will I be missing any of these with the Android app?

Voice is not in Android. I use a codec that isn't available on Android phones, and older phones are too slow to decode it. So if your private/group classes include live audo, it won't work, and the archived lectures won't either.

Probably the right thing to do is switch to a standard VoIP solution for the whole server; SIP would be the right thing to use today, but back when I did the live audio there wasn't any off the shelf option that worked for me. So eventually phones will support it, but I still haven't settled on how I will do that.

Other than the live audio, all the things you do will work fine on Android devices.

[lobotommy]

I have and iPhone and and iPad. I am considering getting tethering for the iPhone, which would allow me to cancel the 3G plan I have for the iPad. I was thinking that if I have tethering maybe I could purchase an android device to use for accessing KGS. I obviously don't want a phone because I don't want another data plan. I just want something I can purchase as a wifi device and tether to the phone.

What would you all recommend? Since I already have the iPad I was thinking a seven inch form factor might be nice.

Terri

You may try to look at AlwaysOnPc app if you want to play on KGS on iPad. It is NOT like LogMeIn or TeamViewer because it is not linking to your desktop. Try it for free, on their website there is all info needed - easy to find. It is not the best solution, but it is at least 10 times cheaper than any tablet with Android.

[Li Kao]

Voice is not in Android. I use a codec that isn't available on Android phones, and older phones are too slow to decode it. So if your private/group classes include live audo, it won't work, and the archived lectures won't either.

Those performance problems are a bit surprising to me. Is JSpeex that slow compared to the normal speex, or are are the mobile processors that bad? I remember using teamspeak which uses the normal speex on quite old computers without too much CPU load.

[wms]

Voice is not in Android. I use a codec that isn't available on Android phones, and older phones are too slow to decode it. So if your private/group classes include live audo, it won't work, and the archived lectures won't either.

Those performance problems are a bit surprising to me. Is JSpeex that slow compared to the normal speex, or are are the mobile processors that bad? I remember using teamspeak which uses the normal speex on quite old computers without too much CPU load.

It's not that speex is bad, it's that pre-2.3 Android would use an interpreter to run your program. Plus some of them had slowish (600MHz) CPUs. So a slow CPU + interpereted java = too slow to do real time decoding of an audio stream.

I could use a native Speex implementation but that has its own issues with compatibility if or when people use something other than an ARM. Another option would be to use a Java-based speex implementation, but only use it when I could see that the phone was powerful enough to keep up. But that of course needs a lot of testing to determine, and if I'm going to switch out speex with my custom encapsulation for something more standard, then maybe it would be best to just go straight to that and not mess around with fitting speex in. I'm not sure yet.

[Chew Terr]

Can these tablets (like the eee transformer) handle Guo Juan's audio go lessons, do you know?

[wms]

I doubt it, chew terr. Her webmaster has done some programming but unless the java applet was replaced by flash, I don't see how it would work.