As I mentioned earlier. I jumped off the deep end and dove into the world of Ubuntu Touch. One of the principle hangups I found was that there was not a FICS chess app. While this still remains to be solved, there was a great web-app for Chess.com.

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Overall, the mobile interface for Chess.com works great. Just like playing on any chess server, there are buttons and doo-dads that allow you to pick different game types and lengths, as well as tons (and I mean tons) of options to change the graphical view. The view you see above is my mix/match version of the numerous options available. There are superior looking themes, backgrounds, pieces, and boards, but I wanted to focus on the game, so that's why I chose this setup.

There was a few problems when using it with UT. You can see one here:

This pop-up appears before the start of every game, which is a little annoying. Fortunately, just tapping anywhere on the screen makes it go away, so that's no problem. The other two issues are a bit more of a hassle, but as you will see, only if you really needed them.

The first is that I cannot upload my profile picture from the UT phone. Every time I click "change image" on my profile screen, it asks me to choose an app, if I choose gallery or the file manager, the picture can be chosen, but it never actually uploads.

The only other issue is strangely related. After a game is over, you can download or share the pgn/gif of the game, but with UT, I couldn't download it. A little annoying, but overall not really a show-stopper. The tap and drag interface worked flawlessly, and the availability of games seemed much quicker than on FICS. I might be hooked!

Linux - keep it simple.