Thanks to its clumsy online interface and weak computer, only beginners will find MKC2 satisfactory.
Now hot seat chess is essentially passing a cellphone back and forth between friends, which is great for long car drives. The pieces in MKC2 are small, but easy to distinguish and customizable. There is a "takeback" feature, The battery life is good, and I say most of the time its superior to bringing a magnetic chessboard in the car. Up to three games can be saved if you need to go somewhere. On the downside, this feature will not get much use. It also made me sad that you could not go back and forwards through moves for analysis, although this won't be a concern for beginners.
The online play is "correspondence" chess, which is very appropriate for a cellphone. In correspondence chess, rather then playing one game at a time, each player will play several. And unlike normal chess, people often "leave" games and only make a move several days later. This sounds odd, but because you are playing several people at once it is usually your move in at least one game. This makes a whole lot of sense on a cellphone, because you don't want to be tied down playing something for half an hour. If you have to leave, or somebody calls, no problem, you can just come back to your games later. The battery life is also fairly good for this feature. An excellent feature is that the PDA version of the online game is available online at http://magmic.com/mkc2/battlefield.php if you lose your cellphone, or simply want to play the game with a better interface and *slightly* bigger pieces, and it only takes 5-10 seconds to switch games (joy!)
Unfortunately, I have a lot of criticisms about how this was done. Because of the nature of correspondence chess you will want to switch which game you are looking at quite often, but uh-oh, up comes a loading screen. Every time you switch games you are met by about 20-30 seconds of loading/transmitting and it's incredibly annoying. Secondly, matchmaking is poorly done, and you are often matched up with opponents much weaker then you (or stronger). There is a ladder matchmaking system, but you are only allowed to play four games at a time using it. Third, there is no chat or "Friends", the online is very basic, although that's expected for a five dollar cellphone game.
Now we get to the real meat of the game, the chess engine. The chess engines strength I estimate is about 1300, and takes a bit less then thirty seconds to make a move on an LG 285 budget phone. If you don't know what those numbers mean, the program should be challenging enough for you (on the lower strengths, moves are almost instant). The program also lacks an opening book, or a way to randomize moves, so you will literally get the same response every time. If you beat the computer once, if you wrote down the moves, you could beat him 100 times in a row. I expect the program will be too weak for some experienced chess players, but its difficult enough for 90% of you. On the harder difficulties, the battery also drains quite quickly on your cellphone, but this is not a fault of the program.
Overall, I would suggest looking for different software if its available. Since this is the only bit of chess software I have figured out how to use on my cellphone, its what I use. I would suggest not buying this software period if you are elo 1400 (an average club player) as the program simply won't be challenging enough, few players online will be challenging, and it lacks the ability to review completed games. Virtually the only useful feature will be the pass and play local multiplayer.