Hand held chess player

Hi everyone - I've seen the advert for the Monroi Personal Chess Manager which looks pretty good.   I wondered if anyone has used it - or anything similar - & what's your advice?

What I'm looking for is a device which allows me to load games from chess.com (& to enter myself) which I can take away & analyse at my leisure - sitting in the living room with a glass of wine probably :-)

Looking forward to your recommendations - Oh, & thanks to Erik & co. for the site.  It's  hard to think how it could be bettered.

Chris 

Hello Chris

I am from Newcastle, I don't know about a chess manager, but a bottle of wine or a newcastle brown does sound good!

Wow, I've never seen a white turd before! Did anyone look at the price of that monroi thing? Hahahahahahaha. $370 for a pgn viewer (nope, I didn't see anything on the site for an actual chess engine at all). Go buy a laptop at a pawn shop for 250, 50 bucks for an old copy of fritz, and you save $70!! That will buy you some drinks for your "Thank goodness I wasn't stupid enough to buy a Monroi!" party. Nuf said.

You could also get a Nintendo DS $125 bucks and then Chessmaster $35. That would give you a nice palmsized unit to work with. That is probably the most practical. Having the novelty of download directly from the website to a handheld would not be worth the money. Get something like the DS and get much more functionality (a chess program you can actually play and tutorials too!) at a cheaper price! I would just print out the pgns and put them in by hand. Unless you are playing 75 move games, this will be easier than you think.

Hope this advice is helpful.

Mr Mike

I mailed MonRoi & they replied with a decent mail but I hadn't looked at the price on their site.  It's very expensive I agree.  Sounds like the Nintendo & Chessmaster may be a better bet.  Thanks Mr Mike

Anyone else got any comments?

I don't have any, but you may want to check these out:

http://chessconfessions.blogspot.com/2007/05/my-monroi-is-evil.html

http://www.chessninja.com/dailydirt/2007/05/monroi_and_i_and_you.htm

http://boylston-chess-club.blogspot.com/2007/04/monroi-and-copyright.html 

I use a Palm PDA with HIARCS chess software on it.

It's perfect for what you are describing.

As well as being able to play/view/analyse while sitting on the sofa you can take it anywhere. 

 I play 99% of my chess on it and the other 1% on this site.

 John

I'm looking into Palms & HIARCS (strange name). 

farbror - can you explain what's missing in terms of a PGN editor?  I assume I could load a game from chess.com onto a Palm running HIARCS?  Is it just that I can't add/delete/amend moves in the native format?  Hope that question makes sense.

Thanks, Chris 

HIARCS, which of course is an acronym, stands for "Higher Intelligence Auto Response Chess System".

You can load games into HIARCS when you sync your Palm with your PC. 

I was just about to ask about Palm Powered programs, because I saw Chess Tiger, Chess Genius, and HIARCS -- it looks like HIRARCS is the leader in this -- anyone have any experience with Chess Tiger or Chess Genius?

Hey Chrish....

I might have what you are looking for - I tripped across this a bit ago -- looks good:

http://www.tinyware.com/soft_pocketchess_features.asp 

There is a Windows Mobile software called eNotation that records moves only and only USCF would allow its use.

Read their site for more details and limitations.