<\/p>\n

\u00a0I’ve had my Droid X for nearly a year now, and I’ve found quite a lot of decent games for the device. I haven’t yet discussed the crossword games on Lungfishopolis, and now that Scrabble has made its Android debut, it seems time.<\/p>\n

\u00a0I first tried Words With Friends<\/strong> (pictured far left)<\/em>\u00a0when a friend with an iPhone recommended it to me. I loved the fact that it was cross-platform, so I jumped on board. But despite holding my own with some very tough opponents, I soon grew a bit weary of Words With Friends. It seemed that so often, games would degenerate to small, tightly-packed clusters of two and three letter words. I blame this largely on the score tile placements.<\/p>\n

\u00a0So I tried an alternative: Wordfeud<\/strong>. (pictured center)<\/em>\u00a0I’ve found the score tile placement in Wordfeud to be far better than in Words With Friends, and the word-clumping problem is far less pronounced. There’s also a “random” score tile layout, pictured above, but I don’t use that. While Wordfeud doesn’t look nearly as nice as Words With Friends, it runs faster and with fewer connection-related bugs. But the real win for me was that it notified me when friends played a word, even when I didn’t have the app running on my phone. Maybe Words With Friends does something like this on the iPhone, but not on Android. It really makes a huge difference. Playing the iOS version, my wife thinks that the game timeout is far too short, but that’s one of our only complaints about Wordfeud.<\/p>\n

And then Scrabble <\/strong>came out. (pictured far right) <\/em>Actual Scrabble-branded Scrabble for Android. I’d seen it on iOS before, but the Android version is relatively new. I downloaded it immediately. The App is slow. It’s tragically slow. It’s gastropodically slow, and I don’t care if that’s not a word. Running Scrabble on my Droid X feels like running Netscape Navigator on a 286. It does have the best score tile layout of the three games, and it’s nice that it tracks your highest-scoring words, but it’s slow<\/em>. And the advertising is far more obtrusive than either Wordfeud or Words With Friends. And the notification doesn’t work on my phone. It says that it requires an active Google account, but I have one and I get no notifications. The settings contain no hints as to why. And it’s slow.<\/p>\n

So, in summary, here are the three apps and their individual plusses and minuses.<\/p>\n

Words With Friends<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n
• Shake to shuffle letter tiles is a nice feature<\/li>\n
• When you try to play an invalid word, it tells you exactly which word(s) are invalid.<\/li>\n
• Has a terrible score tile layout<\/li>\n
• Crashes a lot when connection is poor<\/li>\n
• No notifications
  \n<\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n

  Wordfeud<\/strong><\/p>\n

  \n
  • Avatars are a nice feature<\/li>\n
  • Good score tile layout<\/li>\n
  • Has notifications that work!<\/li>\n
  • Quick and lightweight<\/li>\n
  • Inferior graphics; zoom is clunky
    \n<\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n

    Scrabble<\/strong><\/p>\n

    \n
    • Shows points as you’re making words, which is nice feature<\/li>\n
    • Uses a Facebook or Origin account to log in<\/li>\n
    • Has the best score tile layout<\/li>\n
    • Tracks your highest scoring words<\/li>\n
    • Slow as hell<\/li>\n
    • Way too many ads<\/li>\n
    • Notifications do not work<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n

      They’re all good apps, each with features that the others don’t have, but I’ll be staying with Wordfeud. I’m sure that each of the three apps will continue to add features, and maybe the Scrabble app will somehow manage to slim down, but it’s EA-branded so I hold little hope for that behemoth altering development with any agility.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

      \u00a0I’ve had my Droid X for nearly a year now, and I’ve found quite a lot of decent games for the device. I haven’t yet discussed the crossword games on Lungfishopolis, and now that Scrabble has made its Android debut, it seems time. \u00a0I first tried Words With Friends (pictured far left)\u00a0when a friend with […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[252],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2958","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-android"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/greghowley.com\/lungfish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2958","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/greghowley.com\/lungfish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/greghowley.com\/lungfish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greghowley.com\/lungfish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greghowley.com\/lungfish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2958"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/greghowley.com\/lungfish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2958\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2969,"href":"https:\/\/greghowley.com\/lungfish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2958\/revisions\/2969"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/greghowley.com\/lungfish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2958"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greghowley.com\/lungfish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2958"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greghowley.com\/lungfish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2958"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}