One of my favourite Christmas presents this year was a little puzzle game called Lonpos. It's a box with ten jigsaw pieces, a playing grid, and a huge number of puzzles where you have to fit the pieces back into the rectangular box given certain starting conditions. Great fun, infuriating at times, but because of the vulnerability to losing the pieces, not perfectly suited to life on the road.
Step forward Phit Droid from the Ovi Store. Promising thousands of puzzles, with an infuriating edge to them at times, Phit Droid is a great little time waster. The goal is to arrange the pieces you are given into a rectangular shape. The only other hint you are given is the number of little squares that are contained in all the pieces, which should help you decide what size of rectangle you might be looking for.
Almost. Because being told “35” doesn't answer the question of whether it's a 5x7 or a 7x5 rectangle. And don't get me started on the number of permutations that 24 can give you! The other gotcha that makes life interesting is that you can't rotate any of the pieces. The orientation they are at the start of each level is how they will stay for the whole game. Rest assured that all the levels have a solution, even if you can't see it.
Phit Droid makes good use of the touch-screen - to move the pieces around, you simply drag them around the screen. There's no specific area where you need to complete the square, the game's smart enough to spot a completed solution no matter where it is on the playing field. One quirk is that you can't lift one piece over another, you need to move pieces around each other. On later levels, with a large piece count, this can lead to some traffic jams as everything gets in the way, which adds to the charm of the game and creates a certain physical relationship between you and the pieces.
The only issue I have with Phit Droid is the main menu that allows you to choose which level of difficulty to start with, or reach the in-game help. It's nothing more than the standard S60 list view, like you'd find in the contacts applications. Yes it does the job, but there's no elegance or simplicity and it feels like a rushed addition just to finish the game.
A bit of polish on this part of the UI would do wonders for the presentation of this game. I suspect this is partly to do with Phit Droid's birth as a conversion of a popular game on another mobile OS platform. Putting that quirk aside, this is fantastic value and should keep the average gamer busy for weeks. Totally recommended, with the caveat that you keep a nice big fluffy pillow close by while playing so you can throw your phone down in a fury without damaging it.
– Ewan Spence, March 2010.