Can Amazon’s Kindle Play Chess?

This story on Crave shows a lot of interesting reverse engineering is going on with Amazon’s new E-book reader, the Kindle . How long will it be before we are able to install Shredder, Crafty, Phalanx, or GNU Chess on one of these devices? At $399 however, I’ll just stick to my laptop for now. There are quite a few out there who are already bashing the design, including Robert Scoble. Perhaps we’ll see these dumped on the market for an improved version 2.0 model. I could see using this as a highly portable chess computer that I could also use to record games, as well as for reading PDF e-books.

But it must get cheaper. MUCH cheaper.

UPDATE 2-10-2009: How was I to know that a year later Amazon would indeed introduce a version 2 Kindle.  Seems to be a much improved model,  but will it play chess?  I can certainly put all my chess PDFs and ebooks on it,  and that’s a great thing…Rich

Hey Jude…

I wrote a short post on Jude Acers back in July. Well it seems Jude is still in great form, according to an article in this Month’s USCF Chess Life. Apparently Jude showed up back in September ‘07 for the World Senior Championship held in Gmunden, Austria.

He scored highest among the American players at the event, and his 2289 performance there indicates that he is no slouch at tournament play, even after a long hiatus.