I have been playing Sudoku, a puzzle of logic, for the past one or two years.

 

 

Though not an avid Sudoku fan, I normally play the game on the newspaper during my free time. Recently I noticed someone next to me in a public transport playing Sudoku on his mobile device. Come to think of it, playing Sudoku to kill time like this can be really cool. Unlike action games which need lots of your attention, Sudoku can be left idle or paused anytime so that travelers won’t lose track of their stops from playing too intensively. If my memory serves me right, quite a number of the latest handphones come preinstalled with Sudoku. But if you have an older handphone without this game, no worries, as we are digging into the world of Sudoku.

You can get a free M-SuDoKu, cutely named PhonPhun, from http://phonphun.altervista.org/eng/sudoku.php. In there, they also offer M-Kanji-SuDoKu and M-Puzzle, both also free. But they are still under license from GPL (General Public License). The agreement is the software is free for public usage but not for commercialization. This is so that unscrupulous businessman cannot take the codes to sell. I have yet to try M-Kanji-SuDoku or M-Puzzale but I presume that the M-Kanji-SuDoKu is just a normal Sudoku with Chinese or Kanji (Japanese) numbers. As for M-puzzle, it is advertised as a 15-puzzle game.

M-SuDoKu runs on J2ME. So any phones’ platforms that support Java will do. The current version is 0.9.6 as of this article. It seems that developers do upgrades quite often to incorporate enormous amount of new puzzles.

 

M-SuDoKu is advertised to support unlimited number of grids, but surprisingly both the .jar (application file) and .jad (Java description file) files downloaded are only a mere 60KB. Among the highlighted features are user friendly interface, Medium or Difficult, interchangeable background image, restart option, input mode for devices without number pad, or input mode for devices with both joy pad and number pad, “Show solution” option (for either the complete grid, a single 3 x 3 box or a single cell), “Check solution” for the current cell, help option by highlighting cells which can be easily solved, and “Skip current puzzle” option. Finally there is automatic language selection: English, Italian, Spanish, German and French. There is Chinese too but only on M-Kanji-SuDoku.

If you think that’s about it for M-SuDoKu’s features, then you are in for a surprise. As I mentioned earlier about the GPL license, users are given the source code. So, if you know a bit of coding or are interested in customizing M-SuDoKu, you can make it unique to your phone. The PhonPhun website even has a dedicated area teaching techniques on customization. The easier customizations are modifying splash screen appearance and board appearance. The hard ones involve customizing menus and translating to another language. If that isn’t a challenge enough, one can even try to follow the source code and make changes to it. Kudos to PhonPhun for providing such entertaining software on mobile devices for free! If you enjoy M-SudoKu as I do and have some spare change in PayPal, do kindly make donations to support the makers.

 

Just in case some of you got stuck in the Sudoku games, I would also like to introduce mobile Sudoku solver. I found two of this on the internet.Their web addresses are http://web.ics.purdue.edu/~atuncel/sudoku.php and http://cons.org.nz/~gringer/JMeSudoYu.cgi. Both are freeware and run on Java. But don’t expect them to do wonders. The programs should be able to solve most easy and intermediate puzzles. But for those requiring guesswork, these programs will not help. But still, the Sudoku solvers are a big help for beginners. Carrying the software in your handphone entitles you to bragging rights for solving Sudoku within seconds.

So, what you are guys waiting for? Let’s Sudoku!