ICC releases iPhone app

It was about time, with dozens of chess apps already available for the highly popular iPhone from Apple. Since Thursday, August 12 the official Internet Chess Club (ICC) app "Chess at ICC" is available in the App Store. You can play and observe games, or play against an engine.

A random search for chess currently gives over 500 results in the App Store, the service created by Apple that allows users to browse and download applications for their iPhone, iPod Touch and/or iPad. Until Thursday a week ago, a big one was missing there: the official ICC app. The popular online chess club, with over 30,000 active members (amongst them many super grandmasters), now allows you to play and observe games with a native appplication on the iPhone.

This first release offers a mixture of online and offline features. One can play rated or unrated games at the ICC over Wifi and 3G on the iPhone. One can also observe games being played, and chat with other observers. Besides, there's an in-built computer engine to play against. After playing the games are stored, and one can replay previously played games.

The price for the ICC iPhone app is US $0.99 or EUR 0.79. Currently there's an introductory special offer where anyone who chooses a new username collects a 30 day membership of ICC. Besides, they're offering ICC access via the iPhone app for $0.99 a month.

A few enhancements to this first version will be added in coming weeks, among them an easy way to find and watch live games from top events.

For the moment ICC is not developing anything for other mobile platforms, but they are in touch with a couple of third party apps that connect to ICC. At the moment, for Android you can find a paid one here and a free one here (still in development / beta released). For Windows Phone 7 there's a paid app here (still in development).

You can find a demo of the ICC iPhone app here.