Grand National fever sweeps the nation this month, purely because is the most popular event in the UK racing calendar and – traditionally – is the one that attracts the most casual betters.
If you aren't a racetrack regular, are you just going to be throwing your money away or could there be a way for your GALAXY Note II to help even the odds?
Here is our selection of the apps that could help you pick a winner on the gee-gees as well as some apps to help you get the most fun out of horse racing, whether you are a seasoned fan or just a casual flutterer.
An understanding of and ability to read racing form is something that any dedicated racing enthusiast ought to develop.
If you are more of a hobby better and the Grand National is the only race meeting you have taken an interest in for some time then you may need a hand.
This no-frills app will efficiently collate the racing form and statistics for upcoming races and wiz through it to make its own recommendations. The app will highlight the horses it believes will do well, based upon the crunched numbers.
Met Office Weather Application
Race officials will carefully assess the Going – the state of the course (from Heavy to Hard), based upon moisture levels in the soil.
For the full picture of what will be happening, climate-wise, on the day of a race you could do worse than the official Met Office Weather App.
This gives an extremely detailed breakdown of the Met Office's predictions for a given day for any UK location. 'Aintree Racecourse' is one of the locations it knows about and with a few taps you can get a breakdown of wind speed, humidity and chance of rain, amongst other factors.
Horse Racing Jargon
The Racing world is a confusing place for the neophyte. The track has its own dialect of stable jargon and gambling slang that can seem like double-dutch.
Don't know a Front-runner from a Furlong? This Horse Racing Jargon app is a handy glossary that you can use to sort Combinations from Accumulators and Yankees. A little knowledge may be a dangerous thing but too little could be the difference between a Banker and a Backward!
Horse Racing News
Horse Racing News gives you all the latest news from the racing world as well as videos sourced from racing sites around the world. You can personalise results to just see news and comment on the topics (such as the grand National, or a specific horse) that interests you and get notification alerts when a story breaks.
The app can also connect to Twitter and Facebook with your login details in order to bring you a social media search on your chosen topics and have keywords from your Twitter feed influence the stories you get shown first.
BBC iPlayer
BBC Radio Five Live broadcasts the Grand National and loads of other major horse races in audio form. Five Live's Racing team promise top-quality commentary and for many people, this is the best way to experience the excitement of the races.
The BBC iPlayer app isn't just for watching episodes of Doctor Who in the bath. You can also stream live radio and this is an easy way to hear Five Live's coverage in high quality stereo.
If, on the other hand, you prefer to actually watch racing then Channel 4′s coverage is justifiably well regarded. For the first time this year, 4 covers the Grand National live.
Channel 4′s 4oD app is currently unable to stream live TV but luckily there is a third party service that will stream Channel 4′s coverage directly to the expansive screen of your Samsung GALAXY Note II. TV Catchup is its name and the free app makes it simple to view UK Freeview channels in HD.
Bets Settler Pro
If you find that your new-found racing and betting knowledge goes to your head and you want to try an exotic bet, this handy app will do all the mathematical hard work for you by crunching the numbers on the various combinations of odds.
Not only will Bets Settler Pro help you to place a Goliath or a Super Heinz, it will also explain to you what these actually ARE, using its glossary.
Racing UK
Racing UK is a handy one-stop-shop for racing and betting news, aggregated from different news sources including newspapers and blogs.
With a monthly subscription you can also watch exclusive live coverage of race meetings from around the country. Subscribing to the app will also gain you free tickets to UK racecourses and other promotional offers.
Draw Names From A Hat
Let's be absolutely honest and up front here. If these apps could really guarantee you a Grand National Winner we wouldn't be making this list. We would be down at Cash Converters selling all our old phones (apart from the GALAXY Note II, obviously) to raise cash for the kind of accumulator bet that could kickstart our early retirement.
There are no guarantees in the world of racing and so you might think that you may as well to just draw the name of a horse from a hat and use that to place your bet. Happily, the Google Play store has you covered here as well, with the aptly named Draw Names From A Hat. Give it a list of the runners and it will do pretty much what you might expect.
Betting apps
Once you have decided which horse to back you need to place your bet and it would be handy if there was an app that would help you to do this on the Play store. Sadly, Google's policies prevent any apps which involve gambling from being distributed via Google Play.
Luckily, that doesn't actually matter! Providing, of course, that you are over 18 years old and have your own cash (and are fully aware of the dangers of losing it all involved in gambling big money!) then you can still enjoy a harmless little flutter now and then.
Go into Settings and then Security and you can turn on 'Unknown Sources' to let you install apps from sources other than the Play store app. Most of the major online bookmakers have Android apps just waiting to be downloaded to your SD card and installed. (Disclaimer: Note II users should be aware that downloading apps outside of Google Play means that their Note II is more vulnerable to attack by applications from unknown sources).
There are apps from the likes of William Hill, Ladbrokes, Betfair, Bet365 and others, all of which will let you place bets securely from your GALAXY Note II via 3G or Wi-Fi. Most of these will also come with offers involving free bets. The site BettingApps.co.uk has a handy list of apps and instructions for how to download and install them.
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